


Grayseeder

by bugmage



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Corruption, Demon Love, F/M, Fantasy, Hetero, Illidan - Freeform, M/F, Magic, Monster - Freeform, OC, Post BFA, Post Legion, Pre Shadowlands, Romance, Warcraft - Freeform, monster love, scifi, spaceexploration, spaceship, throne of the titans, what is illidan doing, wowfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-19 03:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 57,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29744592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bugmage/pseuds/bugmage
Summary: An ex-Illidari scholar captains a modified Legion starship to an apparently barren moon. She tests a brand new type of volatile magic there, but she and her crew hit a snag when a Titan-crafted starship dips into view carrying none other than Illidan Stormrage. According to him, the moon is actually inhabited.Illidan expects to complete his mysterious Titan-appointed Task and leave as soon as possible. He could not have foreseen the unusual dangers of the hidden alien world, nor could he have expected to confront emotions he has become such an expert at stamping out.If you want to see theories as to what Illidan is doing post-Legion, this is my headcanon. There are more threats that the Legion poses other than Sargeras, across the Universe, and who better to hunt them down?There are 22 chapters all posted in one go at 57,000 words and approx 3.7 hours of reading.
Relationships: Illidan Stormrage/Original Female Character(s)





	Grayseeder

FORWARD

1\. Can I write a realistic romance involving Illidan?  
2\. Can I answer what he’s doing with the Throne of the Titans to my satisfaction?  
3\. Can I keep everything within the rules of Warcraft, but still be creative?

I don’t like to write romances of instant attraction across a room, and I wanted to stay away from using Kor’vas, Tyrande, or Maiev as romantic interests.

As much as I like Kor’vas, I wanted to write a character who is his equal. Not a former student of his. 

I wanted to write a character capable of cultivating some semblance of a healthy romance with him, even if it is limited by his station. I am not interested in the obsession he has with someone who never asked to be girlfriend-zoned. (I also have not kept up with her Shadow Warrior Arc, nor the nature of her relationship with Malfurion).

I am also not interested in pairing him with someone who hates him, though that could be a fun and worthy challenge.

Azeroth remains the pivotal Worldsoul. Whatever adventures the crew of Dreamfoil encounter, that will be a constant. Weaver’s Worldsoul is small, despite a similar physical planet size to that of Azeroth, and they will not encounter anything that the beings of Azeroth would have necessarily noticed. There will be small insertions that the player believably did not notice or could not have known. 

I did not read Stormrage. One day I will be that thorough. 

This was written before the first patch of Shadowlands. It will become nonsensical at some point as Illidan is inevitably brought back. Maybe it already is. 

In the end, it is less a romance and more a piece of fantasy-sci-fi adventure with romance in it.

Open to constructive feedback. I am much more interested in feedback regarding pacing and plot structure, rather than ways I may contradict WoW lore (though that is also interesting). Please do not twist the knife. I am just a bug. 

GRAYSEEDER  
By BUGMAGE / CRAFTCARAWAY  
1  
A thousand parsecs from Azeroth, there is a planet-sized moon in the embrace of a purple gas giant. Weaver’s orbit is stable, and so are her sister moons. The giant keeps her wild, ripping, permanent storms to herself. They see her, full-faced, hanging just behind the cloaks of their atmospheres, if they have them, casting an eery purple light that brightens up their nights, and makes her absence stark.

Weaver has hung alone, spinning dead in her orbit, for tens of thousands of years. The last visitor made sure of it. Today, somebody is here. Though nobody is supposed to know what Weaver is, let alone be setting up what appears to be a camp beneath their ship. 

A Legion ship, but not Demon-piloted. Whoever stole it has gutted and retrofitted it completely. Arcane, rather than Fel, powers it, judging by the signatures. 

Curious. His Task can wait a moment. He ignores the suggestions of the Titan-crafted necklace sitting on his sternum.

He supposes it’s possible that people would travel to Legion-occupied planets thinking to sight-see, or collect Demon-skins for their terrible selfish collections. Fools. The worst part is that one of his Illidari must be involved. If they aren’t the pilot, they have made the foolish decision to sell their Legion cruiser to the highest bidder. 

The enormous faux-window (an Arcane hologram with 1:1 accuracy, as though there really was a window taking up half the ship) of his own starship, an elegant little craft gifted by the Throne of the Titans, lights up with messages and alerts. He swiftly dismisses them with a single thought. The window clears again to the approaching moon’s surface (moon is an odd word. Weaver is as big as Azeroth). The earth of it is half-darkened unnaturally, and it has the signature wracked and ridged deformations which signify Legion Fel terraformation. 

It is obvious the Legion visited Weaver briefly. The moon is structurally sound, and parts of it are simply dead rather than veined-through with green and black. Hell, judging by the hardy shrubs and little uncorrupted scurrying critters and insects, it may still have a Dreaming Titan-soul, though he supposes it would be having nightmares. His inquiry is answered by his Titan-forged craft. He laughs openly. There is apparently a huge and nasty jungle biome crowding the cracks of the biggest series of canyons he’s ever seen, elsewhere on the planet. Life is tenacious. 

He pulls closer to the surface. Cracks of Fel energy give way to cold rock with brave, scraggly shrublands and spires like oversized termite mounds. More notifications pop up. The Legion ship is trying to contact him, but he’s not concerned. They wouldn’t fire on a Titancraft. They’ll just have to wonder who could possibly be past its unscannable magic-metal body. If the old Illidari are involved, he wonders, half-amused, if they’ll still salute him?

He sees a familiar name for a moment before habitually dismissing another message. Wait. He clenches a fist in frustration, but the Titancraft (which he’s starting to think he should name) assuages him, bringing it back. 

“Dreamfoil?” he says aloud. He remembers that ship. And he remembers who commands it. 

2  
Illidan Stormrage leans against the shattered walls of the Neurbian cave. The darkest reaches have collapsed. The worst of the Demon horde has been trapped there. He breathes hard, eyeing the wall of tumbled rock for through-ways for the hundredth time. He feels utterly spent, in that brand of fatigue unique to wielders of the Arcane.

“Quick thinking,” he gasps. 

Ystail Duskfield is on her knees, steadying herself with a hand on a fallen boulder. 

The head of a Pitlord is collapsed onto the stone, leaking foul Fel corruption, and replacing the scant breathable air of the cavern with rancid sulfur. His torso stretches out of the rock pile, his wings battered utterly, and one claw totally trapped by fallen earth. The rest is unseen. He’s breathing still, very very slowly.

“Thank you,” she says breathily, wiping sweat off of her forehead, noticing an array of frost covering her elbow, and wiping it off with a soft crunch. “For blasting me out of the way.”

“He was stupid, but just wise enough to notice. You managed to aim in mid-flight,” he says, coughing suddenly, and wobbling over to her spot before the Pitlord’s head. 

“You managed to get a barrage into his mouth mid-sentence. That can’t be comfortable,” she laughs. 

They watch him for a moment. Where before the sounds of Imps and Hounds laughed dark echoes from the innards of Azeroth, there is now nothing but the steady drip of groundwater, the hiss of the Pitlord’s blood as it eats slowly into solid stone, and their ragged breathing. 

Ystail regards the Demon’s ugly face, then looks easily at Illidan. He is the best Mage not of Highborne upbringing that she’s ever met, and easily her equal. He wants more power than he has, which has frightened Ravencrest before, but his hunger is not the same as that foul untethered kind which her estranged Highborne family suffers from. It is not entitlement that drives him. It is ambition. Her ambition is aimed elsewhere (calling to her somewhere in the most esoteric fields of academia and the Arcane, a place that could never be explored if the Demon threat wins), and thus ambition is something she respects and understands. Especially the Demon-killing kind. 

“If you don’t have the energy to kill him, I will.” Illidan says suddenly.

“I have the energy,” she says, taking in a lot of putrid air at once, coughing it all out, then breathing in through the loose lapel of her robes, she stands up. She reaches into an enchanted bag of holding, and when the glint of tools shines in the magelight of the cave, Illidan shakes his head.

“Ystail,” he starts, his shoulders collapsing in disappointment. 

“The opportunity presents itself,” she says. “There are at least ten scholars who would die to see this. I should do it while he’s out cold. It won’t take long.” She steps closer to its head, eyeing its teeth and eyes with a scientist’s fervor, a few specimen jars floating in a little parade behind her, a large pair of surgical scissors in one hand. He reaches out and catches her shoulder.

“We have to go. The cave, the Demon threat…”

“You can’t imagine how knowledge of the enemy could help us defeat them?” she asks quickly. 

“We’ve gone over this. Two dead Mages in the name of knowledge is a poor exchange.”

“The cave is fine. It has settled.” 

“We practice magic, we aren’t earth shamans.” He steps away and starts to summon a portal with his expert hands and trained casting. His technique is distracting. “We did what we came here to do.”

The surgical scissors slide, with some resistance from the junk within, back into her bag, as do the specimen jars. But some of them remain, floating hidden behind her body from Illidan’s view. The barrage of pyroblasts she begins to focus should instantly end the Pitlord for good (and thoroughly ruining the most prime material for study). It’s a complex attack, and as it pools between her hands, she wonders what parts of the Demon would be exposed should his head completely explode. She’s not fascinated by construct composition and the like, but there are some specimens necessary for certain fields to progress. Her name in those books would do wonders for her career... if the Demon threat is successfully disposed of, of course.

“Why do you weave them like that?” Illidan asks, his amber eyes complimented by the red of magic fire. 

“If they conflict with each other, the burst tends to be more severe,” she says slowly, concentrating on building the blast barrage up with the scant energy she has left. “If you can get their nuclei and tails to flash simultaneously…” she trails off. He’s already working it out on his own. 

A full minute passes. They both step back, using the portal as a shield. Illidan erects an Arcane barrier, but it is shaky from tiredness. 

She throws it. The pyromantic barrage enters the beast’s yawning jaw, slack against the stone, and, as expected, explodes utterly.

They manage to stay clean of the myriad viscera and acidic Demon blood. There is a grand shaking. The beast’s body must be contorting posthumously. Rocks and dust are kicked up, and something muted and far away crashes down.

Illidan is already mostly through the portal when he looks back and sees Ystail Blinking for the neck stump. 

“Illidan! You look battered… what is that sound?” Kur’talos Ravencrest asks, having assembled a troop of guards around the portal’s exit point at the Keep’s gates. 

He doesn’t speak. His hands start to shake, and he watches the portal with a crazed fervor. The breathable fresh air of the outside, and the muggy gray of an overcast sky are of no comfort.

Illidan Stormrage knows better than to sacrifice himself for this. A mere two extra dead Mages could mean the difference between the death and life of Kalimdor. And one death is better than two. 

“Is Ystail coming out?” Lord Ravencrest asks, looking between Illidan, a figure staring singularly at the portal, wracked with anticipation and potential energy, despite how badly he’s shaking from fatigue, and the portal, through which the sounds of mysterious deep rumbling are putting everyone on-edge. There are crashing sounds—muffled by the portal, but terrible all the same. 

“Illidan,” Ravencrest demands. “Where is she?”

Suddenly, she’s there, clutching her thigh, winking with pain, but there. Illidan throws his head up and breathes in, closing his eyes, and turns away from everyone.

“I got it,” she says, smiling at a few filled bottles of greenish viscera, watching Illidan go. 

“The Demon is finally dead?” Ravencrest asks, and with her nod, the troops cheer. 

The day turns to night. The light of the half moon smiles at their fort, and Ystail writes a note.

“Few understand you like I do. Few understand me like you.   
Thank you for not risking yourself, and thank you for not ratting me out.   
Would you meet me tonight at the garden path? I want to show you my favorite flower.”

The note is short. She does not say what she wants to—that they have been through a lot together, that he makes a lonely world seem a little less so. She does not say these things, hoping that it will hurt less when she is inevitably spurned. 

She waits before the impossibly rare burst of dreamfoil carefully cultivated by the stubborn gardener, a plant she’d only ever seen in Highborne planters, with its wonderful indigo trails of petal bulbs and sassy leaves. She fully expects to wait in the cold of night for hours, completely alone. She is partly right. 

Many know of the love Illidan has for Tyrande, the fruitless adoration he holds for someone who has chosen another to be her life mate (Illidan’s brother, no less). In delivering the carefully folded note beneath his door, she was whispering into the void. If someone whispers back, it is a pleasant surprise. 

She sits down achingly, careful with the bruise healed by the druids on her thigh, and feels the velvet of the petals between her index finger and thumb. Far away, she is being watched. 

On the walls of Black Rook Hold, Illidan stands, arms folded, in the shadow of a tower. He started out into the night drawn forward by a force he could not describe. Instead of letting it lead him out into the garden, he climbed up the stairs, getting as high as the Fort allows, as close to the sky as he could get before his wits returned.

He is glad she made it out of the cave. He cannot explain the insufficiencies of the word ‘glad’. He dare not try. He wants to meet her there, in the garden, lit by low glowing bulbs and shimmering with a thousand flowers. The want hurts. 

She finally leaves, walking slowly, with a limp just barely noticeable. 

Illidan looks up at the halfmoon. There is a feeling he cannot betray. Tyrande will see him for what he is and love him for it, one day, when he is proven right. 

If not—then it is his station in life to be alone. He is used to it.

3  
It is clear from the start that these aren’t mere tourists.

Their dorsal turret turns to aim at him. He watches from the window as an armed procession exits the Legion battleship. Half of them are robed. Warlocks? No. Who has been riding with her? Is this some kind of research ambition? She can’t possibly be involved. It must be someone else’s doing.

They are ready for anything. A bulwark of Demon Hunters stands between Illidan’s Titancrafted starship and the hulking Dreamfoil and its encampment, their battle stances sinking firmly into the dying soil of the forgotten moon. Among them, men and women in plate armor—men and women of all races. At least they didn’t take the war with them... 

...Are those really Paladins? 

At his command, his little elegant bullet of a starship unfurls its side. He steps out. His hoof meets an alien soil. A ripple of tension at the horns and wings of his silhouette is swiftly replaced by astonishment, confusion. There is a wave of relief, or gratefulness. A Demon Hunter says his name before she can stop herself. Somebody starts to kneel, and somebody else stops him.

“Where is your superior?” Illidan asks, to no one but the air of dusk as the sun sets bright boiling red over the ill grey-green land. He eyes the Demon Hunters. There are familiar faces. Some, very familiar. 

One steps forward, the Demon Hunters and heavily armored ones part for her. An orc Shaman? On a dead moon? Are there still living elementals? She pats a fist to her sternum.

“Felora Firewreath. What are the likes of you doing on a random Fel-hole moon?”

No airs. Illidan smirks. “Are you the captain of this... expedition?” He draws out the word. She’s watching the hook of his wing catch the sun-set without fear, as though she were observing a new shift in the ecosystem with all the patience of a gnome archivist.

She grunts. “I asked first, Stormrage. I’d like to know you aren’t yet another thing my young shamans have to fuss about.” 

“No danger here, Shaman.” He steps back with one foot, and she gets an eyeful of the titanforged starship behind him, no longer hidden by the shadow of his wings. A reminder of his new duties. A person patronized by the titans themselves should do good by them or be erased from existence. “Merely ...curiosity.”

The unspoken motivations are there, lurking in broad daylight, feeling bold in the belief that Firewreath wouldn’t bother looking into them. She looks at him, looks to the left. “Kor’vas.”

Kor’vas Bloodthorn is among them? He watches her emerge from the listening crowd. Twin blades of black glinting metal, the make of which he has never seen, rest on her back. “Firewreath. Illidan.” He would laugh at the impropriety if he cared more. 

If Kor’vas is involved, this can’t be nothing...

“Handle our guest. Answer his questions. Hell, take him aboard if you want. I,” the Shaman turns, taking something out of a satchel which looks suspiciously gnomish and metallic, “have decided this won’t be a threat to the objective.” At her word, the crowd breathes for the first time. Many follow her back onto the Dreamfoil (while she apparently says something calming enough into the communicator to point the ship’s dorsal turret gun back to its forward resting position). The Demon Hunters (and the curious) hang behind.

In the brief silence between Illidan and Kor’vas, framed by the whispers and chatting of the remaining crowd, the two Demon Hunters regard each other in the quiet sightless way exclusive to those who have made that great sacrifice. Her face is as unreadable as any other Demon Hunter’s.

That is, until she smiles. 

And she’s not the only one smiling. 

“It is interesting to see you. We thought you would be holed up at the jail cell of Sargeras for eternity. What are you doing here?”

He frowns. “The Titan’s prison has tasks for its jailor,” he says, measured. He notices Jace Darkweaver talking with visible relief to another Demon Hunter (whose name he should probably remember… was it Feralon? Firidon?). The emotions they’re displaying are wilted, clipped versions of their non-hunter counterparts—a Mage is laughing so hard at a joke he looks like he might soil himself, while his Demon Hunter compatriot is, at best, humoring it with a half-smile—but it is all more emotion he had seen any of his trainees show in decades, other than rage and the occasional despair. More than he has shown in—

“You have questions. I will show you around, Illidan, unless you need to get back to what you were doing?”

Her face, at his name, has reset back into the familiar stoicism associated with the perpetually-Fel-tortured. 

The whispers, the chatting, and the laughter is too much. His wings stretch out, just so—by an inch or two—but it is enough to impose his presence. He takes two heavy hoofsteps. It goes quiet. They look up to him as they used to. Darkweaver clears his throat, bows his head, and slinks off behind the crowd toward the ship. Others follow. 

“My Lord,” a Demon Hunter says. 

“Privacy, Illidan?” The lack of the “Lord” title in the way she addresses him irks a man who had thought himself above Azerothian politics—literally and figuratively. 

He nods once. They watch the rest of them leave. 

“This frivolity is… interesting,” Illidan snarls. She is the highest ranked Demon Hunter here, as apparent by Firewreath’s respect for her. And no one has made a single mention of Dreamfoil’s original pilot. What would lead Kor’vas Bloodthorn’s deep ambition to Weaver? The glint of metal catches his Fel-eyes. Something at the bow of the ship is starting to turn, but he cannot tell from here.

“We’ve learned to be... frivolous. In the absence of the king of Demons.” Kor’vas waves an elegant clawed hand. 

“Sightseeing? Killing for sport?” he hisses.

She shakes her head slowly.

“Some are here for the innovation. But we,” she says, referring to the other Demon Hunters, “are here to find new purpose.”

His scowl shows his sharp teeth, and he broods over her. Her smile deepens his irritation. 

“Illidan. What would you say if someone found a way to wipe the Fel clean off an entire planet?”

His head snaps in her direction. She does not wilt beneath his gaze, the way she had as a new recruit long ago. “Keep talking,” he says, turning his head to scan the horizon. The whole moon reeks of Fel. But, he notices suddenly, there is a neat semicircle of… what can be said, other than “nothing at all”? A large patch of blank soil reaches out from the side of Dreamfoil’s landing spot. There’s a sizeable crop of blue-green grass he had dismissed as being transplanted Azerothian life. 

“None of us believed it until we saw it for ourselves. But Stygia—”

Illidan jerks his head back toward Kor’vas, startling her. 

“Captain Stygia?” he asks. 

“There probably isn’t a second Stygi-” she cuts herself off, remembering who she’s talking to. “Yes, yes. Stygia used to be a Mage, just like Jace.”

Just like me. “I’m familiar with the history of my most reliable pilot.” 

The pause is too long, and he starts to walk in a random direction. Kor’vas keeps pace readily despite the size difference. He hates that she’s trying to read him, but who wouldn’t? 

“Well, as soon as Sargeras was behind celestial bars, she set immediately to solving a problem. What is a Demon Hunter without the Legion?”

“The Legion has not dropped dead with its leaders.”

“Of course. But a chicken without its head will eventually stop running. The Legion will always be around, but we can make it far more stupid and miniscule than it has become.”

He says nothing. He had not put any thought at all into what his Illidari should do, other than continuing to sink their blades into Demon flesh. For thousands of years, the Legion seemed endless and infinite, as much a fact of life as death. If they are not a hellish horizon stretching infinitely out, but instead a line segment as finite as the life of a fly… 

If anyone had to think about it… He picks something out of a claw and flicks it. “I have... wondered what destinies my Illidari would choose.”

“Instead of rotting slowly to death alongside these distant doomed hunks of space rock, why not slay two Felbats with one glaive?” She is smiling again. An odd sight. It is neither of malice nor of sarcasm. “We can put ourselves to easy use, scrubbing them clean.”

They stop before a crag. It is dusty, and dark, but on this corner of the planet, there lacks the terrible green of Fel. He thinks he sees a puddle of water down below. He finds himself wondering if anything lives within it—bacteria, or even larger?—a question he would have mulled over ten thousand years ago. 

“I... will believe it when I see it.” 

“We’re prepping it now, actually. Good timing.”

He looks back at Dreamfoil’s bow. It has been modified more than any other part of the ship by a longshot. A curious array of pillars aim at a rapidly spinning gyroscope. 

“Take me.”

4  
An old gray gnome on a spider-leg mobility chair clatters toward him from the front of the Helm room.

“I thought I heard Illidan Stormrage’s name over the comm! My name is Juli Stormkettle. You spooked us on the drop in. Does your craft not get messages?” She nosily eyes the Titan-crafted necklace he’s wearing, wide-eyed with thought.

He looks over her, sweeping the room. Its architecture remains wicked and shadowed through, but some enterprising person (probably an elf or a draenei) has draped every vertical surface with vibrant linens, and covered the floor in rugs. There are cozy chairs and desks everywhere in varying stages of clutter, and a bustle of people occupying them. There are a couple Paladins stationed at the archways leading to the gunrooms, a random assortment of berobed Mages and the like, but no obvious captain at the Helm’s main console. 

To his creepy silence, Juli raises an eyebrow and keeps on chattering. “You got here just in time to witness the majesty of our mission.”

“I’m sure it’s pretty from in here,” Kor’vas remarks.

“Hey you’re the one who volunteered. You can swap out at the drop of a hat—”

“I know, I know. Juli. Do you think our guest could get a front row seat? He’s… curious,” she says, side eyeing him.

“Of course, come, grab a seat.” The little elderly Mage skitters over to one of the Helm’s tertiary consoles. Dozens of little blue-projected windows scroll with complex numbers and information. A viewport occupies most of the projected space—looking, through the use of Arcane magic, at the ship’s bow from a good distance away. 

This Helm used to be occupied by trapped Demons and expert tacticians. Quiet, except for the input of the co-pilots and the commands of the Helmsperson. The left and right gunrooms, loud with the rumbling of their fire. Now it is… cozy, and busy with the hurried feet of dozens of people, the ruffling of papers, casual jokes and frantic announcements. It is lit by Arcane bulbs of warmth, rather than by the sickly green of Fel. He suspects his presence has put a damper on the liveliness, but it is still much more frantic and busy than it ever used to be. 

The human Mage that has been eyeing him in horror and disgust from his desk of papers and instruments since he first walked in stands up, and leaves in a huff. An undead Mage brushes by his shoulder on his way out. She’s shambling quickly. 

“Juli!” she shouts. She cuts short, suddenly, stopping a meter away from Illidan, and looking him pointedly up and down. “Stormrage? Aren’t you supposed to be… fighting Sargeras for the rest of your life, or what-have-you?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” Illidan asks.

The Forsaken Mage smiles. Her teeth are uncannily taken-care-of, perhaps replaced wholesale with false ones. She snaps a bony finger. “Georgia Weitmont doesn’t stay dead. Juli!” Her head snaps forward, and Juli continues not to hear her over her own thoughts, as she pulls up some more information. 

“Spidergnome!” Kor’vas shouts loudly, causing half the room to glance over. Juli whips around in confusion. 

“Yes? Oh, Georgia! Illidan, you can sit here—” she points quickly at a chair, then gathers all of her attention up and gives it to Georgia. “Georgia, are we good…?”

Illidan picks a spot on the wall near Juli’s console to lean against. Sitting is a comfort he indulges in alone, if ever. 

He begins to relax there, but tenses up, ears perking forward, when he watches two people emerge out of the port side gunroom, the door opening and closing like an aperture. One night elf Druid, and one night elf Demon Hunter. 

“You did wonderfully, and thank you for coming,” Dreamwarden Lurosa says. The young Demon Hunter dabs at her face with a Fel-burned handkerchief and bows in appreciation. She leaves the room without noticing Illidan at all, and another Demon Hunter enters the helmsroom and smiles at the Druid. 

For a moment, Lurosa stares openly at Illidan. Illidan’s scowl is met by passive warmth, and a brazen little wave.

“Nurilar,” the Dreamwarden says as the other Demon Hunter gets closer. “It’s always so exciting to see the cannon charge up, isn’t it?” 

The Demon Hunter makes a swift noise and nod of affirmation before they disappear back into the portside gunroom. Beyond, the room had looked even more cozy than this one. 

“Therapy,” Kor’vas says. She had pulled up a chair and set it against the wall next to him. She watches his ears relax. “You know. A gun fires off, it has to cool down. I haven’t gone yet. I should.” She gazes out at the room, looking like she wants to say more.

“That explains a lot,” he mutters savagely, waiting for Juli and Georgia to stop animating at each other with meaningless information. He sees Kor’vas examine him in his peripheral. “This cannon everyone is obsessing over. It will cleanse the land?”

“You will see, but yes. Explaining won’t do it justice.”

“Weaver was chosen as a test subject,” he states, and sees Kor’vas nod. 

“No one lives here, and it’s got plenty of safe areas with zero corruption,” she offers, watching an orc sprint into the room breathlessly and hand another orc a set of vials. They both talk briefly, looking suspiciously at Illidan in the corner of the room, then they walk out. 

“No one lives here,” Illidan states slowly, looking at Juli for a moment. She says something that makes Georgia laugh. 

“So... “ Kor’vas starts. “Did the Throne send you here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He says nothing. A long moment passes, and for some reason, Kor’vas laughs. He raises an eyebrow. 

“I say I need therapy, but I think if anyone in the universe does, it’s you,” she says, shaking her head. 

Before he can make a retort, Juli is suddenly before him. “Wipe Tank four, while you’re at it. It’ll be fine, just knock em over one.”

Georgia starts toward the door. “You got it, boss. Kor’vas. ...Illidan,” she nods, and leaves. 

“Sorry about that,” Juli says. “Georgia has some experiments about a corrupted grell, and now she wants a live corrupted Weaver animal. As much as I love my mana wyrms, they don’t need to be taking up so much space. Now,” she claps her tiny hands together. “You wanted to see our grand experiment!”

Her communicator buzzes with excitement, and her bright smile slowly descends into worry. 

“Juli, ma’am, Core D small emergency, requesting any priests and Paladins available, seal damaged, um,” The voice buzzes with static, but frantic chatter can be heard behind the speaker. 

She puts it up to her face, and turns to the Helmsroom. The Paladins are already running up the staircase at the entrance to the room. “Bengus and Enna, please make your way to Core D and work on that seal. Noellene, if you would—”

Noellene’s soft voice washes through the communicator, “Me and mine are already at it, Juli.”

A dwarvish voice, a father and daughter duo it seems, announce brazenly that they have “already got a fine handle on the kink, nae take a gryffon’s flap mar til it’s right perfect.”

The gnome takes her finger off the button and mutters to herself, pinching her brow. “Why is it always D?” She puts her finger back on. “Update me when it learns to stay put, I have every faith in my crew.”

“B doesn’t even argue this much,” Kor’vas says. 

Juli nods at her and makes an exaggerated shrug. “Who knew void would be ten million times more stubborn than Fel? I swear, the presence of Demon Hunters scares B into submission.”

They are playing with evil magic, Illidan thinks. They are putting someone like Juli in charge of these things? This project is doomed to fail. If the Fel can be scrubbed from planets, it most certainly won’t be these fools that do it. 

A hush falls over the room. Illidan looks up.

“Captain Stygia,” somebody says, saluting. Others follow suit. A Mage at her desk stands by instinct. 

There she is. More scales than skin, with her hair cut short like a human male’s, tall and vertical horns, wicked claws, and a permanent pair of ruddy pink-red wings. She’s wearing the threads of a blood elf magister, causing her Demonic appearance to be muted by the order of clean fashion.

She walks on cloven-hooved feet into the room with a noble’s affect, acknowledging no one, coming at rest before the Helm’s main console, where a massive projected-viewport of the outside occupies practically the entire wall. 

She looks right at him, nodding once, and bringing her communicator up to her mouth. “Core D crew. Status report.” 

“Captain! We’ve got everything about under control.”

“Core teams. Status report.” 

“A is go,” a draenei says cheerily. 

“B is go,” Jace Darkweaver says. 

“C is go,” says the unsettlingly altered voice of a Death Knight. 

“E is good to go,” Georgia shouts. 

“F is go,” a vaguely familiar tauren’s voice says.

Felora Firewreath pipes up with enough confidence to power the ship herself, “Elementals coaxed, and Core G is go.”

“Core D… Yep, yep. Core D is finally go, confirmed.”

Stygia sighs. She looks at Kor’vas. Kor’vas nods, and disappears into the starboard gunroom. 

“Systems check,” Stygia says, hitching the communicator to her hip and pulling up multiple different windows on her Arcane screen. 

The radio chatters with different voices—some dwarvish and gnomish ones—spewing technical words back and forth. 

Illidan watches her work. It’s quick, and he can’t completely tell what she’s doing, but he sees that the Six huge rods connecting to the ships bow cannon have started to light up, parts of them spinning. Are those the cores themselves? 

“Kor’vas, Abigail,” Stygia says simply.

“Gyroscopic lenses in peak performance,” the undead voice of Abigail responds.

“Brushlands targeted, brittle barrier operating fine,” Kor’vas says. 

Most of them don’t notice Illidan has left the room, and they certainly don’t notice him grab a communicator someone had left sitting on the corner of a desk. It chatters at him as he walks through the narrow corridors.  
He hadn’t Felt the ship raise off the ground, but it had gone straight up into the air by dozens of meters. The front door he entered through became a double-airlock, and he had to fly and Rush using bursts of Fel energy to reach the top.   
From the roof of the ship, Illidan watches the corresponding rods light up even more. Each of them have rings near the bases of their barrel-tips that spin rapidly. By far the thickest component has started to extend from the body of Dreamfoil toward the turning gyroscope.  
“Core Z on the approach. 20 seconds,” Stygia says through the communicator he pilfered.  
The gyroscope slows to an incredibly specific stop, just as a vibrating light comes into being at its center. The three rings of the gyroscope are aligned. The approaching component, Core Z perhaps, is lined up with their circles like a bulls-eye—if it kept extending, it would go through them, and through the emerging magic, without touching any component directly.   
“Aimed and charging. Ten seconds,” Kor’vas says.   
“Confirmed,” Stygia says.  
“Three… Two…” Juli’s voice announces. Illidan imagines that the little gnome is skittering around the Helmroom in excitement.  
A shimmering shield instantaneously erects around the entire bow of the ship, a few meters ahead of him. It’s Arcane. Core Z is nearly there, approaching by inches now, and suddenly, Core rods A through F fire at the central scrap of vibrating magic. It lasts for less than a second, but it’s enough to produce a small, controlled explosion, a bloom of rainbow too bright to look at with unaltered eyes, and practically as painful as the sun to look into for a Demon Hunter’s magic-sight. Core Z’s tip disappears into it. Then a loud sound like the roar of Deathwing pushes Illidan’s long hair back. He folds his wings in instinctively as to not be torn back by the shock.   
He barely hears Stygia say, “Core Z touchdown. Barrier gone.”  
In an instant, the Arcane shield disappears, and all of the contained energy careens in a solid beam straight at the target kilometers away from the ship.   
He’s glad he went outside to see it. He feels like he can comprehend the power and majesty of the cannon in a way he wouldn’t have been able to from looking through the viewport.  
Kor’vas sounds—for a Demon Hunter—excited over the communicator. “Core teams de energize, structures stable, target hit. Commencing sweep.” The gyroscope lenses turn minutely. It doesn’t seem like much, but the end of the beam miles away starts to travel, wiping the land. He can barely see. A multicolored whirl of disparate magic has kicked up where the end of the beam has touched land. It’s up to the druids, flying high above the site, to report now.   
He watches the multicolored clouds fade in the distance, rising slowly as they go. Someone says his name over the communicator.   
“I don’t know where he went. Anybody?”  
“His ship hasn’t moved, I’m gonna head out to see if he’s nearby.”  
“Druids,” Stygia says. “Status report.”  
Most of the team of druids in the far, far distance are visible only as the suggestion of birds in the sky, almost invisible by distance. Some of them land.   
“Soil feels clean. Shall we commence…?”  
“Please do,” Stygia says.   
Minutes pass. Illidan crouches over a lip on the ship’s outer carapace, a gargoyle perfectly in-place on the wicked black material. He inhales sharply. The distant land is changing. Where before it was grey, now it is becoming dusted by… by a bloom of blue-green grass. The druids are calling to dormant seeds in the soil, or else spreading ones they found, and using their life magic to make it flourish.   
Malfurion would weep at the possibilities. Tyrande would weep, amazed at the gift of the second chance.  
The communicator he pilfered is loud with the sounds of success. Juli’s piercing voice rings out above the rest.   
“Illidan,” Stygia says, and he cranes his neck back to look at her.   
“Captain,” he says, and stands. “I came here expecting lost tourists. Instead…” he turns, his wings swinging behind him, to eye the greening field of newborn life. “I find a weapon of mass destruction, ran by a bunch of incompetents.”  
He expects her to offer a retort, or to become aggressive, but instead, she laughs. He looks back at her.   
“I knew you’d understand,” she says, sighing. 

5  
“...Maybe there is a level of kinship owing to our time working together. Or maybe it’s because I know I am one of the few who see your way of thinking, who does not turn in disgust from your decisions. In the end, I don’t know why I feel like I need to write these. An elf can’t be made to suffer in isolation, true, but my motives may not be so pure.  
“I did love you, once. Though I do not believe anyone should be imprisoned for the emotional stability of the population, I also don’t believe that Illidan Stormrage in particular deserves to be all alone. I hope I can offer some kind of solace...”  
Illidan Stormrage takes another letter from the stack. He sees the words by the vision of his Demonic eyes. It is nearly pitch dark in his Black Temple.   
“They were among a small cache of packages that the Wardens never bothered giving you. Malfurion had sent you a few books of mindfulness poetry, or some such,” the blood elf rogue says, setting several boxes and books out on a blackened altar from his bulky thieve’s sack. The rogue knows better than to ask questions, but he does recognize the name. “Tyrande sent you a book of short stories written by a tauren, for some reason.”  
Illidan looks up at the book of short stories sitting on the desk. It’s thick, and would have been nice to have actually had. But was that really the only thing Tyrande sent? And Malfurion, his own brother… a few floppy booklets. He unbinds another random letter from the tall pile, this one dated thousands of years after the chronologically first one. A feather which once contained a charm or spell falls out, brittle and destroyed by time.  
“...Once you see Silvermoon, you will never go back. The most prestigious Mages practice here—they have some groundbreaking ideas. I have begun to practice under a relatively young man named Rommath. I have managed to pair disparate magicks to interesting ends. Maybe you remember me talking about this, but we were much too busy for theory in those days.   
“I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned how sorry I Felt leaving Black Rook Hold behind. Too many lives were lost because they had lost a good Mage in me, and I hear you had to resort to some unfortunate means of defending the hold from Demons. I just couldn’t stay. It was stupid of me. I am sorry for that. I do think you did the right thing. It was their deaths, or their infinite torture by Demons. If they knew the latter, they would have chosen the former...”  
He can’t stand to read these. He picks up the next, dated another century later.  
“I know Ystail. She’s one of the archmages that didn’t join Sunstrider when she had the chance. I don’t know why I haven’t been sent for them yet… The moronic lot of them.” The rogue rolls his eyes and pats the dagger on his hip.  
The corner of Illidan’s lip lifts in a growl, and the rogue goes quiet, taking more bits and bobs out of his pack.   
Someone deeper in the Black Temple howls with rage.  
“...The War is a way of life for mortals. I don’t know why creatures with the lifespan of a bird are so eager to die toward ends they do not understand. They hold fast onto inherited grudges. We would be stronger as a planet if we faced the real existential threats, the ones that really matter. But that’s ideology. No one believes Azeroth can act as one. Maybe I did, once.  
“I’ve taken up apprentices these days. It’s a… distraction, I’d say. They know nothing, and I fill them up with bits of me, hoping they take away some of my sense and carry it into a brighter future. But ours is a culture of isolation, and that is present in everything they say...”  
“Looks like Malfurion tried to get a bear statue to you. Oh look. He carved it himself. Wait, no. This isn’t Malfurion. Did you train with a different Druid? Back before you—”  
“If you keep talking…” Illidan says, picking up a letter at the bottom of the stack. This one is heavy with Quel’dorei coins minted a few hundred years ago.   
The rogue slinks away, but, annoyingly, stays at the edge of the dark room, skulking and watching his Lord.  
He’s a busy elf, but it is the final letter, and something makes him read it.  
“Illidan,  
You’re to be released in a century, I hear. I was paid generously for the research of my Apprentices (Alaressa overcame the curse, by the way, and is researching background material flux these days). They got their share—but it occurred to me a few years ago that you may not have a place to be, so you can have my share. I don’t think your brother understands what he has done to you, how many things he has stolen. Please accept this seed money, should you need it. By the Sunwell, if you get rid of this because you think I’m pitying you, I will come for you and personally shove coins into your pockets. Elves can be cruel. This, you know more than anyone. Think of it as a leg up, if no one else bothers to offer you that courtesy.  
“I’m sorry for rambling for several millennia. You haven’t sent anything back. I don’t want to monologue, and they won’t tell me if you’re even allowed to send (or for that matter, receive) anything. For all I know, I’m ranting at the sky like a mad Druid. Or worse, I am but an annoying gnat, to be swatted and forgotten about.  
“I just… I didn’t want you to have the nothing they think you deserve.  
“If we ever meet again—and we don’t have to—you can pretend I have never written a thing. But if you do want to meet, I have a few places in mind…”  
“Lord Illidan, I hate to interrupt, but why don’t you utilize my skills? By my expert blade, I could have fool traitor Mages like Rammoth, Maelnerana, Ystail—”  
The rogue’s neck is a waterfall of blood. He is dead in an instant. Illidan unhooks the tooth of his glaive from the man and treads back to the altar of packages.   
If the wardens had had an inkling of mercy, Illidan could have had something to look forward to.   
He can’t stand to read the rest. But he does. He traces a line through the centuries, watches her go from ambition to expertise, from ideology to disillusionment. From sickness at the world, to brutal, cynical acceptance, and eventually, rebellion.   
“...If they can’t see where the world is heading, then they are doomed. But I will not wait for death. Goodbye, Illidan. If it’s possible, I hope you find happiness one day.”  
Not a week passes before Ystail herself shows up at the feet of the Black Temple, enquiring about the transformation. She is recognized by another hunter. One of her old apprentices. She is sad her old master is giving up magehood, but she does not try to stop it.   
A normal life was never possible for him. The things she wrote about—those trips to Silvermoon restaurants, the Arcane art galleries, the rides down Eversong Woods, would never be possible for the likes of Illidan.   
She has seen the same strings above the world that he has always known, and in an act of bravery, has discarded normalcy for duty. He takes her through the black halls of the temple in deafening silence. At the altar, he asks her one last time if she’s certain this is what she needs, a courtesy the others didn’t get. She looks at him. Dark Sin’dorei skin, short hair the sweet color of the clouds that cradle the Azerothian sunset. Her eyes search him passively, and he can glean nothing from them. She is beautiful for the last time.   
She is more than sure. She sets a prison-crystal on the altar. He understands her meaning immediately. The thing she had shoved in there—a powerful and greatly weakened Demon soul, tortured and made mad by Ystail’s preparations—is to be the fuel for her transformation. She had brought her own. It makes things simpler.  
As she screams with the course of green through her veins, and as the wings burst from her back, and the ruddy red scales rip forth from her skin, he realizes he can’t understand the mad eclipse of emotions she has caused within him. The possibility of death is the tear in the sky through which Demons pour. The transformation appears, at first, to go wrong. The Demon almost wins out over her mind. It is a Nathrezim that she had trapped, tricked, in a move bold even for her. Dangerous emotions arise within his heart. Emotions that threaten his self-control. The tattoos that represent the being’s prison-bars burn wicked red shapes into her scales. In precaution, his blade is at her neck when she rises again. She does not look at him, but it is clear she is herself.   
“Ystail,” Illidan says.  
“No,” she grinds her teeth, standing up in a body now rippling with a Demon’s muscles, hooves unused to walking. “That is not me. Not anymore.” She coughs Fel blood onto the dark tiles, shivering. “Ystail is dead.”  
In the end, it’s better this way. She has become someone else, and is now duty-bound. They never have to speak of what could have been. To kill Demons together again is enough. It has to be.

6  
He had expected her to ask him to follow her back indoors, but their spot on the roof may be one of the only private spaces on the ship. She sits uncomfortably, facing him, her clawed muscular arms hugging her Eredarish knees. 

“Let me make this clear. The formula,” she gestures at the bow’s modified cannon. “Is not written down, nor has it ever been. I am the only being in the known universe who knows how to slap gray magic together.”

“Gray magic,” Illidan remarks. Both of his glaives cut into the moon’s weak breeze. She hasn’t acknowledged them once, though he had deployed them instantly, and is filled with the potential to kill.

“Juli came up with that one.”

Silence.

“You’re bothered that my crew doesn’t understand it,” she states. 

“I’m bothered that your crew wields this power the way a dwarf wields a tankard of mead.”

She nods, conceding. “If you saw a magical beam erase Fel corruption completely, you’d be happy too. It’s good work we’re doing. They don’t have to know more. Juli and Georgia and the other Mages don’t understand it fully, either, but they keep the potential horror of the stuff to themselves.”

He considers her for a moment. When he puts his blades away, her shoulders relax minutely. 

“You would do the same,” she says, lowly. He crouches, turning, to keep an eye on both her and the distant hill greening by the minute. 

“Perhaps,” he mutters. “If they knew it could erase anything, they’d be... unmanageable.” A distant storm rumbles, black and lime. “Have you tried it on a living specimen?”

“Juli has her experiments. Corrupted mana wyrms being cleaned out, forgetting what they are, slowly becoming a mana wyrm again. The shamans and the druids have already found…” she twists a claw. “A Wild God, an elemental or two. They don’t remember a thing. They look like infant forms of something powerful. They believe it part of the process of planetary healing, rather than a direct result of the beam.”

“I see.”

She looks up at the stars in the sky. The system’s star has long-sunk past the horizon, but the moon’s night is well-lit by the massive, nearly-full face of the purple gas giant, as well as by the waxing face of a fellow Moon. If she perfects this cannon, entire planets may be saved from the influence of Fel from orbit. And not just Fel. The Universe is vast. Perhaps there are planets out there rattling with undead. Planets writhing with the void. Drowning in Light. But those are not decisions for Stygia to make. She has thought long about this. She will target Fel corruption and, perhaps, the void. Anything else presumes too much. As far as she is concerned, the Fel is suffering, and the void is the total surrender of the mind and body, death-like in its corruption. 

She notices Illidan looking up with her. 

“Why are you here?” she asks. 

“The Throne has given me a Task,” he says. “I have to eliminate a threat on this moon.”

“If the threat is me, I must question the intelligence of the titans...”

He looks at her quickly, his teeth flashing. “You aren’t on the list.”

“Then what is?”

“The Queen. In the eyes of the Throne, she poses a major catastrophic threat.”

“What Queen?” Stygia presses her palms against the metallic body of Dreamfoil. 

“There are people here,” he says suddenly.

She looks off into the distance, leaning forward. “Truly?”

“Hidden. Apparently uncorrupted. As harmless as this moon.”

“Hmm.”

Another moment passes. Their communicators swell with chatter, as a Shaman examining the distant hill discovers a nascent earth elemental, trying to learn how to move.

“I brought them here thinking it would be safe,” she says, trailing off. 

“It is. The moon was skipped over. The Legion was never truly here; merely an offshoot of an offshoot touched down, for less than a day. This Task is about the Queen alone. She has the highest potential danger. But she’s not ‘activated’,” he says the word with sarcasm, mocking the language of titancraft. “Either she is imprisoned or asleep.”

“What… what can she do?”

He looks up again, this time watching the permanent storms of the purple gas giant swirl in slow motion. She looks up too. He sees no reason not to be honest. Stygia shouldn’t ever endanger herself, if she truly is the only holder of this formula, and information is a savior. “She can, apparently, draw the raw physical and magical power from the nearest celestial body. If corrupted, she could…”

“...She could destroy star systems completely,” Stygia finishes. She starts to stare at a bolt a few feet in front of her, thinking. How could such a being come to be? The dragon aspects weren’t even that strong, not even at their peak. It would take a Titan to have such power, nothing less. She suddenly looks at the nearest moon, a pale yellow thing casting a ghostly light. Another one of these moons could have easily birthed a Titan soul. And then what? Did she tuck herself away in hiding? Did she give all the power she had to this Queen? Such a being, corrupted by Fel… a disaster waiting to happen.

“I don’t know how such a thing could come into being,” Illidan says, as though reading her thoughts. “No matter what, she must die before the worst comes to pass.”

“You’re right,” she says. “I will help. Any way I can.”

“That won’t be necessary.” He looks at her. If there’s any incredulity on his face, she would be able to read it. 

She holds up a clawed hand. “Maybe, maybe it will. We have resources.”

“What you have, Captain, is the key to any lock... if that key were a mana bomb.”

She shoulders off his apparent disdain. “What are you looking for, exactly? Where is the Queen?” 

He shrugs. 

“They… There’s no way the Titans gave you so little information.”

“I presume a Titan doesn’t think from the perspective of a mortal.” 

Stygia crosses her arms impatiently. “Your ship might have a hint.”

He shrugs again. It’s good to talk to someone. It isn’t as annoying as he thought it would be. She bites her thin Demon’s lips with sharp teeth, tapping a claw to the hard scales of her chin, and pacing close to the edge of the roof. 

Then, unexpectedly, she walks up to him. He feels her claws slip under the Titan-crafted necklace hanging around his neck, and she scans it with her eyes carefully. He frowns and steps back. She is too comfortable. 

“This is telling you where to go.”

His ears twitch. “Loosely.”

She releases the round necklace and, thoughtfully, looks out at the horizon. Weaver has fallen asleep. The purple gas giant is brighter than ever, and so is the yellow sister moon. 

“I have a clue.”

7  
It began with a simple set of directions. There are three black towers near a strangely pinched crag, she had said, pointing off into the distance. They are thick, squat things, pentagonal totems rising like the teeth of a dead god. There are runes scrawled up and down their lengths, but they are too worn by time and weather to make out. The space between them is… strange.

His necklace points down. Illidan spends all night examining the grounds. With his Titan-crafted Starship, he scries everything in a five kilometer radius, then again in a ten kilometer radius, patient but still somewhat annoyed. Dreamfoil hovers like a bad omen away from the encampment several hundred kilometers in the distance. The Legion craft peeks over a mountain. He ignores her, and instead, notes the unmistakably Impish footprints circling the grounds.

He sits in a meditative state at the center of the three towers for most of the night. Eyes closed, ears drooping, hair barely moving in the lukewarm Weaver night. This spot is the very center of the triangle of empty space that the towers make. They’re each about 30 meters from each other, but if he’s not paying attention, the towers can seem to throw themselves kilometers away in his peripheral, leaping like frogs instead of unmovable black stone. There’s something here. He cannot grasp it. He cannot even begin to know who could, what school of magic or what trained professional could. There is nothing to hold onto. He feels the wind coming from two different directions, but he has no way to test why such a phenomenon would occur.

Walking between them, passing through the imaginary lines they make with respect to one another, causes a sharp sense of vertigo. He keeps his hooves firmly pressed against the gravely soil, and his wings are visibly more outstretched to keep steady. 

The towers each have a hollow. He passes his hand personally through them, seeking the slightest hint of magic. He pushes against anything, probing for anything purely mechanical. If this is some kind of magic gate, he would see it. His ship would see it, even if his demonhunter’s eyes cannot. But there is nothing to be seen. Just a vague and horrid feeling, the purple light of the gas giant, and the sound of wind over sand. The hollows have potential, as though, if the correct object occupied them… something could happen. He notes the way the tower’s far corners point into the distance, coming to terms with the searching he will have to do.

When he passes by a tower, head tracking the center of them carefully as he goes, he realizes that the light hugging the very edges of the towers is being bent. It’s subtle, but there. 

Dreamfoil had crept closer and closer to the hill upon which the eldritch black towers perch. Now it’s blocking the yellow moon above. He sees a shape break off from it, and he takes out his glaives.

In the night sky, wings outstretched, is Stygia. By herself. There’s something glowing in her hand. Dreamfoil remains in her spot above the towers, its crew mostly asleep. What is that? 

She lands on one of the towers, where the only marks of change are the hoofprints of Illidan when he had scoured over their shapes hours ago in a slow and thorough search. Illidan stalks out from behind one of the three black pentagonal pillars. She spots him, and lands carefully by the base. 

“I couldn’t figure it out either,” she says over the pulsing noises coming from the magic in her hand. 

He says nothing, glancing pointedly at her glowing hand, then at the well-used Silvermoon magic staff in the other. 

“Ah. I thought, perhaps, this would help.” 

He braces. “You seek to deploy your magic-eater here, where there is no magic to speak of.”

She closes the fist it’s in, dimming the bright (doubly bright, to those with magic-sensitive eyes) orb of magic. Her claws are coated in something. He sees her face more clearly, and she seems… wounded, by his suspicion, looking at the glaives in his hands. He finds himself regretting taking them out. “No magic that we can see, at least.”

He chuffs. 

“The Throne gave you no tools. It is possible to mask magic,” she says. 

“Obviously.”

She raises the fistful of Gray Magic. 

“They expected Demons to be out in the open, as they almost always are, out of the bounds of Azeroth. Not…” he looks around. 

“Not veiled by multiple dimensional sleeves.”

He cocks an eyebrow. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you a Mage.”

She swallows. “No… Not ever again, not in this life. Regardless,” she pushes the staff’s base into the gravel. “It would take a seer of some sort to consume this manner of illusion. I suspect it was meant to be a seal for something. One object, hidden in three different places, once set into their grooves, would activate… whatever this is. But neither you nor I have the time for such games.”

“Get it over with,” Illidan says. 

“You’re in the way. I’d rather the Titan’s Taskmaster keep himself out of unnecessary danger. The Universe is safer that way.”

He squints at her oddly, then realizes he has come to a stop at the tower’s center again, the way a rolling sphere finally meets the center of a funnel. He exits the triangle of space that the towers make between themselves, but he stops short, turning back. If this goes wrong… he is irritated, suddenly. He is not her guardian, and yet he feels the itch to assure her safety. It’s the Gray Magic, he thinks. The potential of her project. 

She approaches slowly. With trepidation, he watches her release the orb at the very center. It floats out of her powdered hand like a songbird, and with the sharp attention of her staff’s head, it stays put a meter or so off the ground. She backs away. She comes to a stop right next to Illidan. She grips the staff with both hands, shaking hard, breathing like a cornered animal. Whatever magic she is using to control this thing must represent the fullest extent of her clipped Mage abilities, since becoming a demonhunter. 

“Do you feel it?” she asks. Her ears are perked fully forward.

His ears perk, too. “The wind?”

“The air is being transposed. I suspect,” she gasps, wobbling hard in concentration. “Well. We’ll see.”

She releases the staff’s hold, collapsing to one knee in exhaustion, and wobbling to her feet again. The magic orb expands. And expands. And expands. He steps forward thinking to shield her, or draw her back, in an instinct that angers and confuses him, before his eyes adjust to the sight before him. Stygia laughs in surprise and glee. 

The three towers race away from one another at an amazing pace. They are meters away from where they were before, hundreds of meters, and like a shooting star, they are out of sight from one another. Stygia has, to a lesser extent, been pulled away. He sees her not too far, wobbling tiredly on the gravel, laughing with satisfaction. She sees him walking uncertainly over, looking impressed by this moon’s ingenuity more than anything else.

The air itself had expanded from nothing. A horrible fel-touched series of canyons draws out before them. The pinched crag nearby was its entrance, this whole time. At the end of the howling black-and-lime canyons is a glittering and thoroughly ruined city. The biggest building either of them have ever seen sits at its center, a pyramid with, against all odds, complete structural integrity (despite several enormous scorch marks). The grounds around the pyramid are black with corruption. Dreamfoil has been moved (without truly moving) far. She hovers to the pyramid’s right. The sleeping crew members didn’t feel a thing.

“Astonishing,” Stygia says, as he walks up, side-eyeing the ruins in the distance. 

“...Transposed air. The towers were never really where they appeared to be. The weather was acting as though this, this…” he rotates a clawed hand. 

“Spacial pocket,” Stygia offers.

“---spacial pocket wasn’t binding a patch of planet at all. Hmm. Explains the vertigo.” He cocks an eyebrow when he notices her looking at him. “What is it?” he asks rudely. 

She shakes her head, but the motion makes her wobble. “Sunwell. I should get back, before my crew notices I’m gone.”

Dreamfoil is far. The new distance put between them and it by the release of the spacial pocket represents a challenge for the now-exhausted Captain. And, though Weaver is considered safe… it is safe for a corrupted planet (according to the Throne and both of their cursory examinations on the local fauna). Illidan looks at the pyramid in the distance. His necklace still points down, below his feet. The Queen is there… but it will be an ordeal to find her. 

He is prepared to be a one-man army assault upon a likely abandoned ruin. And yet...

He looks back at Stygia. “You were a fool to walk out here by yourself.”

It stings somewhat, but it might be true. She was motivated by something difficult to describe. Though, she thinks, if it had been Lor’themar, or one of her old friends from Silvermoon, she would have still dropped from Dreamfoil. “No more than you were, without tools.”

His face stays impassive. Without her help, he would have had to find this gate’s three keys to unlock the spacial pocket, or risk losing the pocket by destroying the towers completely in the name of brute forcing this trick. His craft comes with a log. The Throne will outfit him better, after his report, if they want their Tasks completed in a reasonable amount of time.

She’s still breathing hard. He doesn’t have a mana potion on-hand. (Why would I? he thinks, irritated) He starts walking in the direction of Dreamfoil. His Titan-crafted vessel awaits them over the edge of the supernaturally dark, corrupted canyon, its side unfurled and open. 

“Come,” he says, when she stares after him, holding her knees. 

She follows. The sun is drawing near---Weaver’s sky is losing its purple darkness ever so slightly. “An escort. I am pleased,” she breathes. 

“Pleased,” he repeats, as they clamber aboard the metallic craft. Stygia sits down as the door closes behind her. He takes the Helm. “I would be pleased if you would refrain from tempting fate out on an alien planet.”

“Would you be?” she asks. Silence. The craft soundlessly lifts up and spears its way through the dawn air toward Dreamfoil. “Then you will come with me into the pyramid tomorrow. For safety.”

He looks back at her, scowling. “Do not jest. You don’t deserve the mantle you made and donned, if you insist on endangering yourself. Imagine if you were corrupted. Your experiment would instantly become a weapon of mass destruction.”

She takes a deep breath. “I am aware. Today we will scry the pyramid. If it’s safe, then, tomorrow…”

“Scrying....”

“...doesn’t pick up everything. I will go accompanied, by you, and some key crew members. Illidan, to be frank, none of my crew members have protocol or experience in exploration and documentation on a foreign planet---including me. I want to give them what they will need, inevitably, in the future. I turn back the second it gets rocky. You, too, for that matter. That place looks like a treasure trove of traps. I would… rather get a hold on its potential dangers, before you go in glaives-first.”

His shoulders droop, and he looks out his projected window as his ship pulls up to Dreamfoil. “I am not your body guard, and you are not mine.” he mutters.

“True. But, for some reason, I feel like we could help each other out in the future. Now that I am doing this. And…” she starts. 

“What?”

She clears her throat. Dreamfoil’s airlock accepts the dock. “To be blunt. It’s an excuse to show you around.”

His posture straightens. He doesn’t look at her. 

“I’m going to take her back to base camp. Today, when my crew awakens, we will be firing the cannon a few more times. I invite you to watch. It would please me. The day after… we can see about your Queen.”

He pulls his ship away when her airlock closes. Not knowing fully what to do or think, he chooses a direction, and spirits off into the horizon. 

8  
It is satisfying to watch his Titancraft come to an understanding of the world in higher detail. Illidan spends the morning helping it do so, mapping out the continent by flying over it, and scrutinizing several more abandoned ruins. Thousands of years had passed on Weaver since their civilization died. The meek winds and the acid rains have crumbled anything made of stone. Some things still poke jaggedly out of the dead soil and sands, old metals suggesting the shapes of shelter. The existence of the pyramid becomes all the more impressive. His craft flies close by a tower collapsed against a mountain, and it rumbles at his disturbance, falling apart.

Away from the pyramid, the jungle biomes quickly decrease in frequency. The heat of that band of the planet, combined with the acidic rains coming from the ocean, are the only things keeping those adaptable biomes alive. A white desert speeds beneath him. He flies over a ravine, and sees Dreamfoil, the size of a cockroach in the distance. The pyramid is several degrees to her left. It is almost noon; they have already scried it for information. He wonders what she found. 

The alert he has been looking for flashes across the screen. This is only the second one in six hours. He sees it—a cave with a thousand ruts leading in and out. Tiny tents. A pool of something green and bubbling. Animal bones. His viewport zooms in. There’s a chained-up corrupted animal, as big as a kodo. An imp tosses it a hunk of something leaking green, and it mashes the thing down with sharpened herbivore teeth. 

He tells his craft to orbit their little village. Like a dragon, a curse, death incarnate, he descends upon the hapless Imp stragglers. 

They scream at him, leap and run and hide and attack. He makes short work of them, and their blood drips from his body and glaives. They don’t land a single mote of Fel flame upon their killer. He sets their tortured beast loose, and it charges headlong into a ramshackle viewing tower they had constructed from scrap metal, instantly destroying it, before running away. 

It is clear they were preparing for something. They were fashioning little suits of armor our of hides and scavenged metals. The same black material that Kor’vas’s glaives are made of glints on the tips of spears, and on arrowheads. The Imp Mother in a bath of acid screams her gluttonous fury from the center of the cave. He picks up the thing that they had devoted the most time and craftmanship to, a miniature zweihander of black metal produced for one of the larger imps lying dead behind him, and, with the ferocity of the Fel-infused, rockets it like a crossbow bolt straight through the Mother’s neck. 

She chokes and sputters, shouting the names of her dead children, and throwing several random bolts of chaos in Illidan’s general direction, collapsing parts of the cave completely. He steps out of the way. Her life force leaves.

There are two skulls on a pedestal. Cursory examination tells him they are imp skulls, but, as he passes them by on his way out, he realizes they most definitely aren’t. They are four-eyed. Crested, their jaws low down on their faces. No nose to speak of. 

He hesitates, sighs, and takes them both. They’re small enough to fit in his pockets. 

He has no interest in alien life. They’re all alike, the residents of this Universe. The only thing of interest are the few individuals belonging to each race who distinguish themselves. Most beings in the universe are boring. 

At the cave entrance, where a smashed pot lay crumbled, he sets the skulls back down into the blackened earth. He shakes off like a wet dog, uncertain why he picked them up in the first place. They would have been good offerings to the curious Captain. But he should not care. 

If you didn’t care, you’d already be in the pyramid, a voice says.

When he steps out of the cave (stepping over a pile of eviscerated imps, which is just as covered in blood as he is), there is a quiet noise in the distance which distracts him. 

He watches out of his Titancraft’s open door as it rises slowly off the ground, the wind playing with his wings and hair. Dreamfoil is shooting its Gray Magic Cannon. A beautiful rainbow-white beam pokes out from its bow, spans much of the horizon, and where it lands, clouds of swirling color arise like a geyser. 

They sweep the beam far, covering what must be hundreds of square kilometers, as the end of the beam widens and moves incredibly fast. 

It is a neutral thing, this Gray Magic, but disgust curls his lips. 

Such a thing should not be possible. If the universe itself has a maker, a God of Gods who created the Titan souls and the shadowlands and everything in-between, they would not have allowed such a force to exist. In most people’s hands—in the hands of the vast majority of the universe’s residents—it is a dangerous, foul tool. A way to wipe memories, magical ability, blessings, to make an inhabited world collapse back to square one of their planet’s cycle. 

If she pointed it at a Titan, the Titan would—what, fall apart, like the primordial planetary core they used to be, now uncontained in the egg of their old planet? If she pointed it into the shadowlands, into the maw, what would happen then? Would death cease to operate as a cycle? 

He has to watch her. To make sure he knows who she is. He used to know Stygia, but can he still claim to? Could he have ever claimed that, truly? 

He heads toward Dreamfoil. A shipful of people is not his ideal environment, but the true Task of Weaver lies within its modified and blanketed halls. 

The druids sprint and leap and fly the many square kilometers of cleaned earth. Shamans spirit themselves along, in various spectral forms, listening to the spirits as they awaken from the clutches of various stages of Fel corruption. Felora Firewreath raises a column of cleaned earth beneath her feet. It is slow to follow her suggestion, but she is relentless, and it obeys. From there, she observes the Druids examine an alien they have yet to categorize. 

He is a long critter. An enormous millipede. He had been half-emerged out of the soil when the sweep passed him over, and now he has forgotten everything. 

“Careful. The tail,” Felora shouts over the earthy plane. The thing’s frantic movements nearly trap a Druid beneath its bulk. 

This is the worst part, the part she doesn’t like to bring back onto the ship. The animals touched, once-corrupted or not, are all an absolute mess. It’s sad to see. 

He might die, if he can’t figure out how his own body works. 

But the saplings around his spot in the earth—whipped by the winds of his roiling—make it worth it. The grass beneath her feet make it worth it. The elementals awakening, and the spirits moving on. It’s all worth it. 

A shadow passes by, and she looks up. 

Stormrage’s ship is watching. She scowls at him, and waves two fingers. After a moment, he speeds off in the direction of Dreamfoil. Felora takes the communicator to her lips. “Captain,” she says in a private line. “Your guest is on his way.”

Stygia is in the middle of a meeting when she hears it, in her humble private chambers. She stares at her exhausted old Magister’s staff.

“Stormwell, Noellene. Give me your thoughts by tonight?”

The Paladins look at each other. Noellene brushes a lock of her blood elf’s blond hair past an ear. “I will research. As for artifact acquisition…”

“Tomorrow morning. Huckden is a guaranteed. Uunem as well.”

“Uunem…” Noellene starts. 

“That draenei Shaman always hovering behind Felora,” Phillip says. 

“Speak to them.” She taps a finger against a report Juli had just given her, warm from her printer bot’s practiced output. 

“Captain,” they say in unison, standing. Stormwell salutes, causing Noellene’s gaze to go far into the distance with an irritation with her human compatriot’s habits that had long turned into begrudging acceptance. 

They leave, and the ship’s Healer steps in unexpectedly, carrying his characteristic incense-fragrance into the room. Calm, but somewhat nervous, obvious by the way he scratches habitually round his left tusk.

“‘Hoy, mon. Do you got a minute?”

“One minute,” Stygia nods. 

He produces a jar from his robe’s sleeve. There’s a little Azerothian mouse inside. He sets it on her desk. 

He tsks. She stares at it. It’s gazing at nothing, wide-eyed, its nose twitching fast. 

“No luck, then.”

“None. And I be thinkin’ none ever.”

She bows her head and sighs. “You are dismissed.” 

He leaves. He is, unmistakably, bothered. But she trusts him not to spread gossip. The mouse had been subjected to Gray Magic—Stygia had administered it herself. The mouse had had a distinct personality, with clear likes and dislikes. She had responded to her name, before. Now there’s nothing but the slowly-recovering instincts of any average mouse. Whatever personality emerges will be distinct from the one before. The old life, forgotten utterly. He had managed to coax her instincts back into working order in a method picked up by the Druids and Shamans, but anything resembling her old life is gone. 

She watches the mouse nervously clean her whiskers. Stygia must appear frightening, through the glass. She looks around. Her specimen jars are mostly occupied, but there is a larger tank resting on an empty shelf. She puts the mouse there, and grabs the newest report, before leaving her personal chambers. 

With half the ship doing ground work, Dreamfoil’s halls are occupied mostly by Juli’s cleanerbots. She makes her way to the Helm, where several Mages hurriedly pore over their work as though they hadn’t just been goofing off. She closes the door to the port side gunroom-turned-therapy-and-greenroom. The walls are more tapestry than metal. Her hooves step softly onto shaggy carpets. 

She has never attended therapy with Dreamwarden Lurosa, before. She may never be able to. Such a tool of healing is best spent on those who need it most. She can’t conceptualize herself as a person who could approach it. Her walls are permanent, and if they have any doors, those may have affixed themselves permanently somewhere around age five thousand, the bearer of their keys either long-dead or impossibly far away. An old immortal cannot simply open up about events occurring thousands of years before a healer’s life even began. But the room itself, while Lurosa is away on the field… it is a nice place to read, at least. 

Kor’vas enters. She sets a flask of hot and fragrant tea down on the desk by Stygia’s report, and crosses her arms. 

“Juli is getting into green tea again. Good choice. Thank you. Jace’s turn to patrol?” Stygia asks, taking a sip.

“Your most honored and beloved guest slaughtered the den of Imps.”

Stygia swallows wrong, and coughs. Kor’vas has a wicked smile. 

“Do I need to have you scrub the floors?”

“You wouldn’t,” Kor’vas says.

“I will.” Stygia turns to regard a figure Juli had included. “He is an ex-commander. The same to me as he is to you. You should go train, or harass Huckden.”

She starts walking out of the room. “Train. Yes. I will go train. That is what we do, when you aren’t looking. Train, and sit there looking ugly.”

Stygia chuckles as she disappears out the aperture-door. As it automatically closes behind her, she locks eyes with Illidan in the Helm room, with Vince Huckden in the background giving him a hidden stink-eye. 

She looks exhaustively at the ceiling. 

“Captain,” he says with a note of sarcasm, entering the soothing therapy-room. There are ten different flavors of comfortable chairs in here, and she knows he’s not going to occupy a single one of them. 

Nor should he. Her nose wrinkles. “Lord Commander. Playing with Imps?”

A trail of Demon blood follows him. She looks around, but there aren’t any cleanerbots in this room. “You had a Mother in a cave.”

“A neat and tidy way to test Gray Magic on living Demons,” she says, taking a sip of tea. She raises the canteen up, offering some to him, and he responds with a blank stare. “But I’m not taking the loss of that experiment too badly.”

“I had forgotten. You pretend to be a Mage, again. My apologies.”

She smirks, and turns a page of the report. Something about soil density factoring differently into the spread of the projected Gray beam depending on angle. Juli had drawn a diagram, with lines so straight they appear artificial. “You have stopped pretending not to have known me?”

He breathes in sharply. “We have a duty.”

“We did. There’s a new one, now. It calls for a different brand of thought. A different philosophy of leadership. Wouldn’t you agree?”

He does nothing but drip blood and look at her. 

“Dreamfoil has plumbing, now. I can escort you to a shower. There are ones large enough for tauren.”

More silence. Then: “Have you ever written it down?”

That’s what he’s doing, she thinks. This is an assessment. “A being exploiting the time ways would not be able to piece it together. It has never been written out. Not even in pieces.”

“How did you discover it?”

She mimes zipping her lips and throwing away the zipper. 

“The gnome—(“Juli Stormkettle,” Stygia says)—knows enough about it to design machines. How?”

“She knows its behavior, not its formula. I can explain further, but you’d die from boredom, and we can’t have that.”

When he folds his arms across his chest, a Fel-dipped chunk of Imp-organ plops onto the floor. “How do you expect to protect yourself?”

Her ears perk up. “Honestly, Illidan, that’s why we’re starting here, on Weaver. We don’t have to worry about that quite yet. I expect it will become more of a factor as time goes on. For example, at some point, Dreamfoil will be occupied only by combatants, and a second and third ship will contain researchers and the like.”

“You are thinking about it?”

“Yes. I will have to. We will not go unnoticed.”

He stares at her. 

“And what about you, Taskmaster? How will you prepare for the future?”

“I will not amass much more attention than I already have.”

“No, but I presume you must amass something. Tools. Resources. They gave you almost nothing, and threw you to the wolves,” she gestures nonchalantly when he bristles. “Throwing a dragon to enough wolves will eventually end with a dead dragon.”

“They have all the time in the Universe, and I will live until something stops me.”

“Something will, if you aren’t careful.”

He scowls. 

She puts the packet down, takes a sip of tea, and stands up to face him. “I will not be afraid to say that I would be happier knowing you were as safe as possible in the dangerous job you have sought. I will outfit you, if they do not.” She is genuine, in her words. 

His posture lessens in intensity, suddenly, and his brow softens. He almost says something.

“We have another firing soon,” she says, brushing a hand through her hair between her horns. “If you want to watch from here, I insist on a shower. Otherwise… I hope to see you with us at the pyramid, tomorrow morning. The scryers found nothing but traces of inert Arcane, and some strengthening wards, plus some small signs of life. A corrupted alien rat or two.” She walks past him. “Nothing that could threaten yours truly.” 

He watches the rainbow cannon blast at another target from a hot spring his Titancraft had located earlier in the day. As he scrubs the blood off his skin, he imagines that she might have seen through him well enough to lie. But that can’t be the case—she is too clever to be dishonest with him. He remembers the way she was. She simultaneously has changed everything, yet, in earnest, hasn’t changed a bit. 

9  
In the purple mists of Weaver’s early morning, Illidan’s Titancraft, with a small crew aboard, watch in stark silence as they rumble through a Fel storm thread full by sharp green lightning and a mug of impenetrable black clouds. They all sigh at once when the slender craft finally swoops out of it. Below them is a foul pit of infinite gashes into the moon—enormous canyons howling with trapped winds, the meeting of a hundred thousands predator’s dens mad with the lack of prey. The canyons, from above, make a direct path up to the largest of the city ruins. On foot, it is certain to be an unforgiving labyrinth, acrid with corrupted animals and leaking green blood. This foul place which they fly over represents the worst of Weaver’s Fel wounds. Foul—but skin-deep.

Illidan fixates on the dark ruts below them and the shadows of shadows of animals within. Stygia is distracted by the fields to either side, at the top of the canyon’s walls. Flat, bare fields, where once grasses swayed (and will again, she knows to her core), and are presently the dusty top shelves where a scrubby dust bunny of a weed manages to drink next to nothing and add a centimeter every dozen of years or so. 

The only noise within the silent craft is the quiet conversation behind the hunters. 

The city looks down at the canyons, or it used to. Most of it has tumbled like toy blocks down stairs. Black bricks of mysterious make have crumbled by time or weather or corruption or all of those forces. Canals still carve the suggestion of order no longer obeyed. 

The grand temple at the city’s center has defied all forces that would undo it. Something had blackened its faces with Fel fire, but its structure is sharp, and it refuses to let go of all those things the city around it has. 

It is an understatement to call it a temple. It is more than a kilometer tall, taller than any building most of the crew of Dreamfoil have ever seen. The temple (or castle or empty shell or whatever it is) is a triangular pyramid, with an equally enormous diamond of two joined triangular pyramids sticking impossibly out of its uppermost point, hovering by the grace of machines unknown, or powerful and ancient magic. 

Zandalar is the name that comes into many minds. If the Zandalari remained enthralled by the colors cyan and gold, and took up minimalism, and perhaps had the same obsession with the Arcane that the people of Suramar did, this is what they would make. Though there is a distinct fascination with triangles and pentagons present throughout the temple’s design.

Illidan lands his titancraft and the crew wordlessly takes point. Nothing troublesome, just as they thought. Corrupted rat-like creatures scurry away, knowing better by instinct if nothing else than to mess with the huge Demon-like beings crossing their paths. The main gates are larger than a dwarvish hangar. Something within the building is glowing a full moon’s glow, but still the crew (the ones without Demon’s eyes, at least) flash their electric torches. 

It is, in truth, more of a city than a temple or a castle. The small crew (the two Demon Hunters, a human Mage named Vince, Georgia, Felora’s favorite Shaman apprentice draenei Uunem, and Juli on her spider walker) walk the halls together with caution, and as light a step as their feet against smooth marble allows. It is like the Exodar if the draenei took inspiration from hive insects. Rooms and rooms of triangular prisms are stacked in a forest of housing columns reaching the ceiling. They walk for several quiet moments down a large rut in the wide jade floor. They pass by heaps of something mechanical, and the human Mage whispers something to Juli. 

They stop. A skeleton is half-in, half-out of the rut. The draenei, Uunem, gasps.

“By the Light. They fought for their lives,” he whispers, looking around. A half dozen skeletons in similar states of frozen action litter the buildings around them.

Illidan examines the skeleton. It has a tail of three long legs, and a four-eyed skull with a long neck. Four arms with four delicate three-fingered hands are collapsed in front of it.

He looks back at Stygia. He blinks. She’s using Arcane magic, again, and struggling. Her brow is furrowed in concentration. Using magic as a Demon Hunter is being a permanent apprentice. Everything they used to know and everything they used to accomplish is a far-off memory. She grunts with the strain of a simple scrying spell. 

“This isn’t a road,” she says, taking a deep breath and releasing the whimpering Arcane from her fingers. “It’s a river—used to be a canal for the Arcane. But,” she sighs. “I can’t tell, fully.” 

Juli’s sharp voice pierces the silence, though she’s trying to be quiet. “Well… Cursory examination confirms this. It would show clear signs had it been used for water. As for where it all went…” she shrugs.

“There was a battle here,” Stygia says, noticing the terrible husk of a Fel stalker in an alleyway, poked through by the golden bolts of an ancient weapon.

They look at the skeletons littering the grounds, pouring out of dried ancient planters, spilling from the stacked houses. Some of them are very small—others were probably some kind of pet. 

He stands and steps over the skeleton. The skull falls from his hand and rolls for a while. Stygia follows him, distracted by the scene, as though she’s walking back through time to watch it personally. The skeleton of two overlarge Felhounds are collapsed by a root-like carved column. They’re both riddled with golden bolts from a weapon doubtless older than all of her crew mates. The floor where their blood spilled is eaten away.

They follow the canal to a huge triangular door with closed-off, dry waterfalls on each side. 

Juli wordlessly skitters over to a mess of mechanical parts on one side of the door. Stygia realizes it must be a golem, though it has strayed far from the two-arms-two-legs body plan of golems she had gotten used to as a Mage of Silvermoon. The gnome starts to mutter to herself, taking readings, and something about the briefest shocks of Arcane from her fingertips causes the golem’s four elbows to twitch. The human Mage dogs closely behind Juli. He has not stopped stealing scowls at Illidan when his back is turned. 

The door—a massive triangular thing framed with elegant gold filigree and leaking with wards upon wards upon wards—is not dented, scratched at, or burned, but Illidan’s posture tells Stygia it is the place to go. She eyes the titancrafted necklace on his sternum, wondering how it knows. The Legion truly did not care for Weaver—the only Demons they sent were beastly, or a random gaggle of imps, and they didn’t know enough (didn’t care enough) about the moon or its inhabitants to try to reach them past their bulwarks. Hell, they probably didn’t even know of the residents of Weaver at all. 

The temple sounds with the echoes of their barrage as they, together, attempt to tear it apart or force it open. Juli, squeakingly, tries to ask them not to, but she is drowned out by the violence of the noise, and even more so by the Arcane barrier the human Mage has erected to keep them both safe from the ricochet. Georgia leans against an abandoned house-stack, her magic staff winking with fiery particulates, watching with distant interest. Green Fel magic whips the grand doors until its wards break... and it gives, with the keening of a collapsing iceberg. Animals—most likely corrupted ones—scurry somewhere behind them in fear. 

Beyond, they see the wreck they made. A room large by any measure, but far smaller than the constructed world behind them, greets them with the reflections of a thousand glass vases, a third of which they have, by the blasts of their Fel weapons and the rending of the door, shattered, spilling multicolored sand. With every vase is a series of clay discs, and a form of alien writing too devoid of context and substance for Stygia’s gnomish translator to dissect. 

It feels like a graveyard. Objects are too carefully placed. The dust is thick with rare visits. And she sees, with her Demon Hunter’s sight, the tell-tale signs of spirit visitation, leaking behind the physical realm like lines of smoke. Stygia approaches a statue of waist-height, a carefully rendered replica of somebody long dead. Wings, two arms (and not four?), a long snake tail in place of the three legs implied by the skeleton. 

In the middle of the room is a void. A hole, the entrance to a shaft, yawning lightlessly.

Suddenly, all present feel it. A tsunami of an Arcane wave crashes against their psyches. Illidan and Stygia go blind as though looking directly into the whitehot flash of the sun after a long walk beneath the earth. Blues and purples fill their altered vision, and it doesn’t lessen, and they do not get used to it, and they both spin away and flash their wings outward in instinctive defence of the unending visual whorl bursting from the dark shaft. Georgia laughs at first, but when she realizes what must be happening, she ushers them with a sardonic and hesitant Forsaken’s voice behind an abandoned garden’s half-wall. 

“Gears and girders!” Juli screams, her spider-walker’s sensors blaring and blinking. “That’s the most concentrated source of magic in the Universe!”

No, Stygia and Illidan think, almost in unison. The Well of Eternity had a louder sheen to it than this. It must have, right? 

Uunem had rushed to Georgia’s side in a panic, seeing that something was wrong, but unable to recognize why. “I have brought water from Azeroth herself. What is the matter?” He brandishes a large water skin.

Georgia waves in dismissal, and the draenei wilts. “You good, boss?” 

Stygia blinks. She needs to keep track of Illidan. He’s likely to Rush off at the drop of a hat, now that he feels this type of power. In frustration, she digs the heels of her palms into her eyes. Why would he do that? He knows his station. That power isn’t for him and he knows it. Intrusive thoughts come easily with this distraction, she thinks. That was an ancient worry that popped out of nowhere. The past has been whispering to her, since he arrived two days ago.

Vision is returning. The familiar indigo-green-white of death magic forms the shape of Georgia the Forsaken, who watches over the Demon Hunters with a critical eye. The vital life magic of Uunem beats in his chest. But the river of Arcane is still there, if fading. They manage to stand. Illidan chances a look at the gate, squinting hard. 

“Impressive,” he says low, and only Stygia catches it.

They both walk warily back into the desecrated holy place, like carp swimming up an angry river in the middle of a storm. It is fading by the moment—slowly learning to vibrate with the background magic of the pyramid.

An empty shaft descends into the lower parts of the castle at the center of the breeched chamber, traveling deeply into the planet by the look of it. The waterfall mouths at the sides of the now-gaping gate were once fed by the Arcane aquifers, which spiral down the round shaft, once filled with blue and purple, now a makeshift spiral ramp. They hear a curious noise, and they listen for a while. 

It’s a keening noise, a wailing, coming from beneath them. They look at each other. Illidan breaks their gaze first. It reminds them both of the same memory—a hunt they both did, ten thousand years ago, when they tried to route a powerful Pitlord from an abandoned Nerubian cave after weakening him for almost a year with guerilla assaults. They remember the way the cave collapsed onto him as a final blow, in that claustrophobic space. That shaft could be wider. 

“What do you think we’ll find?” She asks.

“Hopefully the Queen,” he says simply, giving nothing. “But you are not coming with me.”

“You aren’t going either,” she says. He looks at her. She stands straight up and turns to look at her crew, her wings brushing funereal ash across the floor. They had taken to muttering amongst themselves. They immediately go quiet and rigid when they meet her gaze. “Juli?” she asks.

“Yes, Cap’n?”

“You, Georgia, and Vince should get a barrier erected over this gate. Something impermeable to Demon fauna.”

“Permeable to you two, though?” she mutters something, staring at nothing, then looking at a nodding Georgia. “It’s possible. We can do it.” Georgia has already laid her pack down at the side of the breeched gate, and has begun rummaging and mumbling. “What’s in the hole?” Juli says, breaking her own concentration to skitter over to the very edge, and losing her breath when she sees the way it… never seems to end. “The ship didn’t see this when we probed…”

Illidan takes a step or two toward the edge, but stops to listen to Stygia and Juli, his ears perking to catch their words unconsciously. 

“You can’t go down there. Well, you CAN, with your wings, or I guess you could walk down those aquifers if you wanted to waste a week. But it could literally be a death pit. This could be a construct specifically to trick Demons, the perfect way to filter them down into a Demon meat grinder. You fall down there and the walls themselves could eat you up, for all we know. It’s a perfect and believable trick. You realize that, right?” Juli had had to work up the courage to meet Stygia in the eyes over the course of several months. To cope, she pretends Illidan isn’t there at all.

“Give me a read on how deep it is.”

Juli shakes her head and tuts. Uunem fills the silence by probing Georgia about the contents of her pack, and how she happens to have exactly what they need for a short-term Demon barrier. Georgia reacts like he asked her why she has feet. Vince is eyeing the draenei fondly, and from a distance.

Something pops out of Juli’s spider-walker for a moment, a swiveling arm with some kind of beeping instrument. “Like, a kilometer. Readings suggest there’s huge… wow, huge huge empty spaces just beyond it. Who knows what’s waiting for you? You can’t go, boss…”

“I need you to find a way for us to go down there... without going down there. Projection of some sort,” Stygia glances at Uunem the Shaman, “A robot of yours?”

“Actually,” Juli says. “Well I can’t speak too soon. One moment.” She looks back at them suspiciously once, then turns the corner past the broken gate toward where the deactivated golem was resting. 

In the privacy of her absence in the now-empty breeched chamber, Illidan almost dives straight down the shaft. He takes another step... but gasps sharply as his chest meets Stygia’s halting, clawed hands. She’s before him, suddenly, between him and the empty void barreling into the planet. His heavy horns rise, a look of disbelief disappearing in a flash as he steps back. 

“You’re not going either,” she says. There’s a foreign sound in her quiet voice. It’s almost tender. It disarms him, and then, it angers him. 

“You forget yourself,” he says. The words are unheard, but the tone causes Georgia and Uunem to look, from their place by the gate, at the wings he has half-spread in anger. He steps around her. But she’s there again, not pushing, but holding a hand on his chest. 

“No. You have. Are you going to undertake every Task with this same brashness? This place could be anything. We are blinded by the power coming from—whatever is down there—and a threat could take you easily by surprise. The lure of your first task cannot be your undoing.” He twists away. “The universe needs you.”

“What would you propose I do?” he asks, his teeth flashing. “Wait for the Queen to crawl out?”

“Illidan. You are wiser than this. You have tools at your disposal. If I have to sit up here and do nothing because of the mantle I chose to bear, you must do the same. You are the ideal taskmaster, not simply because of how good you are at spilling Demon blood.” She taps a finger to her head. “You are clever… And you make the decisions others can’t.” 

They look at each other. Stygia steps to the side and sits on the ledge into the empty shaft. She closes her eyes and breathes. She hears him grunt in frustration. But he doesn’t jump. 

“Imagine if the universe lost you,” she says. She surprises herself with her honesty. A twist in her heart prevents her from looking at him, at least for now.

Those same words form within, then fail to leave his mouth. 

The Arcane barrier sparks into being behind them. Uunem starts to clap and cheer, and Georgia, despite everything, can’t help but smile, as she grips her staff in quiet triumph. 

“Captain Stygia,” the human named Vince says, sounding more like an Alliance General than a Mage, marching a few steps into the chamber. “Juli has caused the alien mechanism to obey. Would you prefer a golem as a means of scouting, or shall we drop this endeavor for something else?”

“What’s the term...” Stygia asks herself. “Can we make it a paired control scheme?” she asks loudly. 

“Paired control scheme?” Vince cranes his neck to ask Juli, then he nods at them. “Affirmative.” 

Illidan looks at her with a raised eyebrow. She smirks. 

The improvised “keystone” pairing devices fastened with simple magic to both of the Demon Hunter’s foreheads are actually little chips of ceramic etched with hasty runes. With them in place, Illidan and Stygia open their eyes and experience the world in an extremely muted way, through the “eyes” of alien golems. Having four arms and no legs takes getting used to, but they get the hang of it. They sit their bodies down just past the erected barrier and trust the small crew to protect them from… well, the little rats can’t get past the barrier, so absolutely nothing.

“You can hover now, but you can’t fly for long, only turn a jump into a glide. Don’t rock the boat too much. I don’t even know if you can survive the drop—to be safe, glide from aquifer to aquifer.”

Neither Demon Hunter bothered to follow Juli’s advice, as well-meaning and wise as it was. Illidan didn’t because, of course he wouldn’t, and Stygia didn’t because, of course Illidan wouldn’t. They about plummeted the entire way down the shaft, prescient of the alien ways the golem was perceiving ambient magic levels and other strange information. They both expel a burst of magic from their legless lower torsos when the floor is within view, and manage to land with but a few scuffs. The keening has grown to an alarm. It is steady, alien, rhythmic. A heartbeat. A warning. Both.

At their feet (or lack thereof) is a palanquin, dropped with obvious haste. The transparent vase atop is filled with pink sand. Beautiful beads rest on the pile of sand, and another ceramic disk with an alien language leans against the vase. 

“Do you hear that?” Illidan asks, his voice sounding strange coming out of a golem’s constructed body, bracing stiffly, like an attack bot.

“I can hear nothing but the siren, to be honest. This is a strange way to experience the world.”

They hover down a long hall, broadening, and ribbed by three different wide-open gates. If they triggered an alarm, why wouldn’t the gates close?

They exit the long chamber with caution, and a slight excess of aplomb owing to their entirely disposable bodies.

The next room is, somehow, even larger than the city-like chamber they first entered through, and is an even thicker forest of stacked housing blocks—planters reaching out of columns like shelf fungi are spilling over with thriving alien plants which crawl up and down walls and stick fronds into the ventilated air. Patrolling globes of light—simulated sunlight, they could both sense via their golem’s sensors—soundlessly weave up and down and throughout the pathways on impossibly thin hair-like legs. To their basic sensors, this chamber is filled with life. Sapient life. 

The keening siren is louder in here. A chorus of echoes bounces off a thousand artificial trees of carved stone like a horde of angry sound birds. 

They hover down the steady slope of the hidden city toward the lowest point at the center, hoping to find someone or something useful. 

“I would like to know something,” Stygia says quietly, as though she were respecting the silence of a place of worship. A considerable font of Arcane energy is causing the city center to glow a vivid purple-blue. Their metallic bodies are discolored and glittering the closer they hover. But it is not the main source of the magic flow. There is still something greater, pulling at their sensors.

“What?”

“Where do you think the Queen got her power?”

They pass beneath a tunnel of arches supporting the weight of a flowering vine. Somebody shouts somewhere far away, and Illidan’s golem’s head whips to follow the direction, though their golem’s hearing seems to work the same regardless of the direction it faces. 

“I asked,” he says, surprising her. “They didn’t tell me. The Titans are not much for small talk.”

“Maybe it’s a sore subject,” Stygia says, thinking about the other moons, and the power of a Titan soul.

“Maybe.” 

They reach the center. It is an extremely condensed Arcane pool, cultivated into a long tube of energy deep underground. They do not approach it, at first. The Demonic forces inside of them ravage the edges of their consciousness, begging, demanding, hoping and wishing to take over them both and leap wholesale into the magic lake and conduct an explosion large enough to take out the City. It is by the instinct of their will that they keep away, despite, in reality, being so incredibly far away from it. 

They turn toward the location of the sound. A long wing of the city stretches before them. It is, according to their golem-sight, rife with sources of warmth and cowering life. Stygia swings her golem’s head this way and that in a desperate bid to catch a glimpse of an alien. The magic lake spills a small river down a canal, and the faces of the building stacks blush with moving blue and purple caustics. There is movement in the far distance as an alien citizen clambers into an upper story, whimpering very quietly, too distant to see clearly. The alarm continues to keen. 

They pass by an orb filled with vegetables at the foot of someone’s housing stack. Stygia realizes it used to be one of the glowing travel-orbs, hollowed out and repurposed as a pot. The siren bleats louder and louder.

The housing stacks give way to a market or stock yard of some sort. They aren’t too surprised to see four-armed golems floating to-and-fro, stacking and filling and counting, though their creators have long disappeared. The Arcane canal splits around the market in a round moat, meeting back up with itself on the other side. 

“Somebody needs to service those things,” she remarks, ducking awkwardly under a banner. “Actually—why are they so…” The question goes unasked. One golem has shut down completely in the middle of the market. A stall has stacked cube containers against it. Someone has drawn all over its torso. 

Another golem is performing the actions of stacking and picking up, without a box in its erratically shaking hands. Orange paint glistens on its angular jade body as though in warning.

“They’ve forgotten, haven’t they?” Stygia asks. Illidan doesn’t turn to face her as they walk, but he is considering it. 

“They’re different,” Illidan says simply, pointing with two left arms at himself and another automated golem.

“Newer, I would guess… though they could have different functions,” she adds. “What must they think of two ancient golems triggering an alarm and wandering freely?”

They leave the market and follow the siren.

“What will you say to them?” he asks. 

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you…” he pauses. She wonders if this is the most he’s spoken in such a short period of time for years. “Why did you want to come?”

She closes her “eyes” and is suddenly, vaguely, aware of him, sitting in an enthralled heap right next to her. Their wings have slackened and are pressing against each other. Uunem is laughing somewhere far away at something Georgia said. Stygia’s never heard Vince laugh like that, actually. She thought he had no sense of humor.

Illidan Stormrage would, if it were up to him, wipe a planet of Fel absolutely, and swiftly leave its residents to pick up the pieces and relearn everything all on their lonesome. And, honestly, if Stygia and Juli perfect their process to such a degree that they can do it from space in less than a full rotation of their target planet, perhaps they would do that. Reaching as many planets as possible is more important than tiptoeing a single one through the process for a century or two.

But surely, there is a middle ground to be found, one which doesn’t require an entire race to be, essentially, left completely alone? 

“I suppose I still have the curiosity of a Mage,” she says, and the vision of her real body fades as the sentence leaves both her real body and the golem’s, causing Juli to look over with wonder. “And I need to make sure you don’t hurt anyone,” she adds. And it’s nice to walk with you again, she thinks.

He grunts. Another moment passes. “Not unless they draw first.”

As they approach another massive gate at the end of the cave-city, they tense about as much as a golem can. Behind the keening siren are the sounds of a crowd, just past the sealed gate. She takes out her gnomish translator, which starts to scatter with broken question marks and random words and phrases as it learns, drinking in context with a dozen different scanners, magical and otherwise. 

“We’ll see about that,” she says, and they are seen. 

In moments, they are surrounded, and clamorous and fearful minutes pass before order is found.

One of the aliens, with a staff in its hands, trembles before the two ancient golems. Stygia holds the gnomish translator before her golem’s body, waiting for it to start working. 

“Hello,” she says. A crowd of the aliens whimpers and clicks and huddles several meters away. The room is like an amphitheater. At the center of the stage, a small bulwark of a door presents itself. The device spews out a translated sound, which causes the leader alien to startle and start to chatter. 

“What... are you, what... do you need...from us?”

“We mean no harm. We want to help,” she says, and the device translates falteringly.

The alien trumpets in apparent confusion, then chatters more. 

Illidan looks past them. Half of the population huddled in the room is looking at the tiny door, their hands raised, their heads bowed. A small magenta light is shining above it. Most of them have combined their legs into snake tails. The ones who haven’t (hobbling erratically on three legs, instead) seem to be the most anxious, or perhaps, ready to fight. 

“Help? Help? Are you servitors of the Queen?” The leader wobbles to and fro on its tripod feet.

Stygia looks at Illidan, who is scanning the crowd. The device is reading as hot in her golem’s grasp as it scans everything scannable. It is making a distinction between the four-armed aliens and the two-armed-two-winged ones. The ones with wings may be female. Two of the aliens, four-armed (male?) specimens with their tails split into three legs, look like they desperately wants to run to the winged leader’s side. 

“We are from another world, and we want to make sure you are safe.” She regrets saying it like that, but has to stand and listen to her translator (which is blessedly getting better at its job the more it learns) hack it all out. 

Someone in the crowd shouts, and her device says “Cultivator!” a few times. The leader looks back, its long vibrant head fronds getting in the way of two of its four eyes, which it bounces away. It chatters. Someone else says “Testing us…”

“Is the Surface finally coming apart, as She has divined?”

“No. The opposite... We are learning how to heal it,” Stygia says.

This message, for some reason, causes the most chaos. Illidan hovers low and arrives at Stygia’s side. The translator picks up a few things: “Truly?” “The Snake-Earth is frozen!” “Lies!” “Harbingers, green-cursed.” 

The Cultivator raises her staff in the air. The crowd quiets in reverence. 

“The Sisters will guide us,” she says. “Give them passage to the gate of the Sisters. Do not touch them. Do not shun them. The Sisters will know.” She flies, her wings buzzing quickly, and the air washes with an alien perfume that they cannot smell. Her legs wrap together into a slender snake tail. 

The crowd parts. The Demon Hunter-golems look at each other. 

“Our bodies would have freaked them out,” she says, switching the translator off for a moment. 

“If they arrive at the conclusion that we’re sacred somehow—” Illidan says, laughing low.

Stygia sighs. “It would make it easier for both of us...”

They reach the platform beyond which none of the citizens have dared to tread (or slither), where the little thick door is, appearing tightly sealed and doubtlessly thick with rigid metal and a thousand wards. The Cultivator lands on the platform, coiling her snake tail.

She says the words, “Witness, wait.” Then, as one, they all begin to sing. And as their strange, alien, beautiful voices please their golem’s ears, Illidan thinks to himself, that if the opposite is true... if they revile the foreign golem visitors and seal their doors shut... he hopes Stygia would do what is right with the duty she has created and seized. Whatever is on the other side of that little bulwark with the magenta light flashing overhead will reveal everything he needs to know about the ambitious Captain.

10  
The Pitlord thought he could drop enough of the Legion onto Thunder Bluff in a coordinated surprise assault to trigger the fall of Kalimdor while everyone was busy watching Argus, busy preparing for the final assault against Sargeras. 

Illidan yanks his burning glaives out of the Pitlord’s gullet, hardly noticing the pain of the Demon’s blood as it drips off his skin. The Pitlord was wrong. He turns to Rush into a Nathrezim, slicing the wicked being’s wings off before the scream has even begun escaping its throat. 

The Tauren fight well. Their warriors break Demons under their hammers and hooves, and their shamans have good fighting sense. The Illidari hop from the tops of tents and skewer their prey without mercy. There is suddenly a great deal of shouting, and Illidan leaps onto a small rocky outcropping to understand. 

The Pitlord had tried to distract them. A common tactic, and almost always effective against a disorganized force. The real threat gathers on the horizon. Legion cruisers collect in a formation he has never seen before. “Barrier,” Illidan shouts, seeing a dozen or more combatants watching him for guidance, and the word spreads like an arrow. “Reinforce the barriers. Long-range assault. We have minutes.” 

He had called for a Pilot at the beginning of this battle, and they have yet to make an appearance. He trusts his Illidari. If they have been compromised, that is understandable, if disappointing. As a hundred or more people gather at the southern edge of Thunder Bluff’s cliffs, shamans and Mages and engineers all working in tandem to produce the firmest magic barriers they can muster, and as scouts fling themselves to all corners of the city seeking counterattacks and tricks, and as wyverns screech and tear through the air assaulting Fel bats, Illidan keeps his eyes trained to the sky. 

The Legion cruisers on the southern horizon, floating above the barrier mountains of Mulgore, point their bows toward each other in a five-tipped star. One of them is slower on the uptake than the others, but soon their Fel-portal-cannons begin to charge in a style he hadn’t seen them try before. Their cannon’s magics are condensing at the center—the empty space between their bows, the middle of the star made of their five bulks, erupts with Fel magic so condensed, Illidan realizes quickly that none of the five ships could possibly survive the attack they’re about to mount. 

Neither will the citizens of Thunder Bluff. 

Illidan shouts for a pilot once more, the Fel-ring one of his Illidari invented burning brightly as it sends his command into the skies of Azeroth. 

He nearly leaps off the Bluff, wings spread, but something in the sky catches his eye. 

Two Legion cruisers warp into the space several kilometers off the southeastern sides of ThunderBluff. Behind them warps Dreamfoil. 

Dreamfoil assaults the two cruisers, taken by total surprise, and having to slowly turn to deal with a rogue cruiser. Illidan wonders what she had to pull to trick them so absolutely, and he looks back at the charging superweapon. His ears perk forward. His ring lights up on its own and begins to talk. 

“We’ve got Thunder Bluff covered, Illidan,” Stygia says. It feels like the weapon is mere seconds from discharging its magic and turning Thunder Bluff into a scrap of Fel shrapnel and poisonous slag, when, suddenly, the Legion cruiser that had lagged behind the others in aligning into formation careens, without warning, into its neighbor. 

“Argus needs you,” she finishes. 

The Fel Hammer warps in, and fires upon the two cruisers being harassed by Dreamfoil. The superweapon collapses completely. The magic it had charged glitters, flashes, and the world is bathed in green-white as it explodes completely, destroying all five cruisers without so much as brushing the mountains beneath them. Non-Demon Hunters shield their eyes from the brightness, then shout when they see it dissipate into smoke and fading whirls of vile magic. Demon Hunters squint at the light show of chaos, but most of them focus on clearing the city of every last Demon. 

Stygia has been one of the Illidari’s best assets ever since she made the sacrifice. He watches with a mixture of feelings as the Dreamfoil warps out of Mulgore the moment the last cruiser is out of commission. Pride is there, sure. Satisfaction, too. 

The Fel Hammer’s shadow passes over him as it takes aim at a Demon rampaging at Thunder Bluff’s feet. By the time the shadow is gone, so is he. 

Stygia watches the last problem erase itself from her list. She presses her hands onto the Helm, aware once more of the voices of the tortured souls powering their commandeered vessel, cringing with regret at the (hopefully temporary) necessity of it. Such thoughts are best pushed aside, but it’s harder to ignore them, now that the only thing she and her crew have anymore is worry and time. The Legion threat assembles in tight formation. They have made themselves a phalanx, pulled in. They doubt, she thinks. They experience doubt on the eve of their leader’s end. They have also made themselves accounted for. 

Still, scouts patrol Azeroth. Just in case. But she is not one of them. 

Jace Darkweaver clears his throat behind her. There is something in his hand, starkly light in the dark and dreary Legion craft. 

“What is it?” she says reproachfully. She understands why her crew can be reticent to speak in her presence, and wishes things could be easier somehow. 

“A missive from Lord Illidan,” he says. He does not look at it as he hands it over. Instead, he takes several steps back. 

The shadow of her towering horns poke upward as she eyes the letter. Blank. Sealed by a greenish magic rune rather than anything physical. She turns to unfold and read it, her emotions illegible by the cover of her Demon’s wings, and the letter is flattened against the Helm’s console. 

Somebody walks by the Helm. Her ears perk back to catch it. A warlock exclaiming that she doesn’t know what to do with herself now that they have half a day’s wait. A Demon Hunter shushes her. 

“Stygia.

Meet me in Suramar when Elune is at her height. Outside of Lunastre Estate.

Illidan”

She reads the short letter three times, then unceremoniously burns it. 

“You are dismissed, Jace,” she says, still not looking back at him. She hears his footsteps exit the Helm. 

A ridiculous request, she thinks, furiously replaying the tracker imagery as the final enemy Legion Cruisers fold themselves away into harmlessness in a loose bubble around Argus, obsessing over every one of them, looking for the idiosyncrasies of plots or tricks. It is possibly the eve of the Universe’s demise. She will be reaching out to her ex-apprentices, and to the two friends she had cut contact with in Silvermoon, but even those she has gone back and forth on. Other Demon Hunters have allowed themselves these interactions (the ones that had family or friends to even contact, that is), but she feels she must more closely embody the sharp sacrifice made in the mantle of Demon Hunter. 

Why would she meet up with her Commander? 

She finds herself staring at the little name of the ship hovering in the corner of the green, soul-fueled display. Dreamfoil. 

Does he regret…? 

The question dies before fully thought. Illidan Stormrage does not regret. 

Neither will I. Love is for elves, not Demon Hunters. She hates herself for even thinking the word at all.

Something reeks in the Helm—more so than the normal stink of Demon-crafts—and suddenly Kor’vas Bloodthorn is there, dripping with the blood of recent prey. She looks even more ghoulish than usual. 

“Stygia,” she says. 

“That was quick,” Stygia sighs, sitting, putting her elbows onto the console, and grabbing her vertical horns with both claws in a drooping posture of existential fatigue. Kor’vas is the one hunter witness to brief glimpses of her vulnerability.

“They’re stupid right now. Particularly.” Kor’vas says through a sneer. 

“I imagine.”

“Captain,” Kor’vas says, flicking viscera off her knee. “What was the message about?”

Stygia goes rigid, and peers back at Kor’vas from behind her wing. The Demon Hunter is uniquely unintimidated. “It was a private message, Bloodthorn.”

“From Illidan?” She shrugs. “Wasn’t an order, not right now it wouldn’t be. Intel?”

The venom in Stygia’s eyes finally convinces Kor’vas to drop it, though she does reluctantly. Jace was so curious. 

“Can’t you go train like everyone else?”

Kor’vas makes a sound that might’ve been a laugh. “No one’s training.”

Stygia lifts her horns out of her hands. “They’re not standing around,” she says.

“Talking. You know. Reminiscing.”

Reminiscing? About their kills, or about the past—from before their sacrifices? It’s not something she has dwelled on. If she has time to think, it has always been about the future. If they think they will die tomorrow, it makes sense they would ease up in this moment. She just hopes they don’t get soft enough for the Demon influence to take over, not that they would. 

Kor’vas hums. “Captain. Darkweaver just assaulted me with a question, and I’m going to do the same to you. What will you do, once this is all over?”

Silence, and the terrible sounds of Dreamfoil’s Fel soul fuel fills the Helm room. She knows exactly what she’s going to. It’s just… “What did you answer?” Stygia mutters. 

“I punched him for asking,” she says, making a terrible noise that could be, in the right light, mistaken for chuckling. “I’ll keep hunting. Right? Damn, what else is there?”

“Plenty,” Stygia says. She looks again at the field of tactical information illuminated before her, then she stands and turns with a fury, her wings clipping through the green hologram of the console. “There is a Universe to heal, Bloodthorn.”

“Captain,” Kor’vas bows her head quickly, taken aback. “Billions of Demons to kill.”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s true, and worthy. But there are mysteries out there, the answers to which could save the Universe forever.”

“What?” 

Stygia straightens, her wings folding closer to her body. 

“When this is done, I want you to come with me. I might have one of those answers. If I could get the right—settings… we could, potentially, erase Fel corruption from planets completely.”

“Truly?” Kor’vas smirks wickedly. “I would want to be in on that.”

Stygia nods. “If—when this is over, if they turn and run with their tails tucked…” she sighs, and turns to gaze out of the holographic window looking over the Eastern Kingdoms and toward Pandaria in the far cloudy distance. “If, if, if. Please, Kor’vas. Keep this between us. I know who I would like to include. But things could easily change in the next twenty four hours.”

“You can count on me,” Kor’vas says, turning to leave. “It’s been nice talking to you, Captain. Erase completely. Ha. Imagine that. You wonder what Illidan will do if this all works out?”

“No,” Stygia says without turning from the console. “But I would… put money on a sudden and unexplained disappearance of some sort. It’s his style.”

Illidan does not wait just outside of Lunastre Estate for Stygia. He keeps to the shadows, hidden in a cloak of illusionary magic on an unoccupied balcony within view. He watches a domesticated Arcane-infused cat sit and groom itself in the spot he had imagined Stygia would wait. He watches Elune drift to her peak in the night sky and start to lull away. There will be no sleep for the Demon Hunters—since the sacrifice, none of them could achieve restful sleep anyway. As though mirroring the actions of his Illidari, he allows himself a moment of weakness. He thinks about the power and majesty and self-assuredness and beauty of Tyrande, of the pain he has held within him for her, of the betrayal of his people and of his own brother against him. He thinks about the letters Stygia had sent him—the promises of one life at the chronological beginning versus the cynical capitulation and eventual rebellion at the end, with no more space for those initial feelings of impossible normalcy. 

He does not know what he would have said, had her form ever appeared that night. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe he would have left, rather than meet her. 

He tells himself that anyone would yearn to be understood, but that doesn’t make him feel any less weak for thinking it. And what is his love for Tyrande but that exact yearning? If she only understood him, what would be different? Is it that she does understand, and thus she is disgusted?

Somebody does, in this Universe, understand. And tonight she stays in her ship. 

Illidan launches off the roof, leaving Suramar, the place of his birth, forever. As his hooves leave the pristine tiles, leaving behind small cracks and fractures, he also leaves behind these annoying thoughts. This kind of thinking is not for a Demon Hunter, least of all him. 

Never again will he allow them to enter his mind. 

^  
11  
The night elf Druid shivers, but he is steadied by Dreamwarden Lurosa’s patient hand. Stygia’s impassive face, linked hands behind her back, and the points of her horns and the thumbs of her Demon wings piercing into the sky, create the very image of daunt and authority. By the look on her face, she appears just as ready to pick the Druid’s guts with her claws as deliver a speech before thousands. 

The Druid inhales, and looks past her, at the feet of the landed Dreamfoil, and at the encampment around it. The entire area has started to spring with alien grass buds. 

The Druid opens up his woven coat, and the head of an infant alien peeks out. 

She eyes it. The magic of a Wild God is a complex and powerful swirl, obvious even in this weakened form. 

“She has taken a liking to you, Raincover” Stygia observes. 

“Yes,” the Druid says falteringly. “We have dubbed them Rut Cattle, f-for the deep footprints they leave behind. She doesn’t remember her name, though.”

“How is her development?” Stygia asks, just as a strong breeze and a wind elemental rush by overhead, hugging the body of Dreamfoil and making the shamans smile. Felora whoops in the distance.

“She walks, talks Common…” Biridran trails off.

“She has grown an inch from floor to shoulder since we first found her at test site one,” Lurosa says proudly. 

Stygia nods almost imperceptibly. “How are the live specimens faring?” she asks. 

Biridran Raincover glances at Lurosa, then says, “They are in charge of their… faculties again. They bow to this one by some kind of instinct,” he pets the Wild God’s four-eyed head. “But we’ve had to hand feed them…”

“They seek their own sustenance poorly,” Lurosa says. “They just got the hang of drinking water.”

Stygia looks out at the pens. The shamans helped construct a basic fence of raised stone around a huge tract of grassy land. Larger versions of the Wild God, almost as large as a kodo, wander meekly on seven legs, smelling and pawing at the earth below. A tauren is trying to teach one of them to run. 

“We must continue cleaning,” Lurosa says. His calm voice sharpens, and Biridran looks at his feet, fearing Stygia’s reproach. “The ecosystem could collapse before us if enough of it isn’t rescued.”

Stygia raises a clawed hand. “I am aware.”

“We’re not even sure if we’re feeding them the right grasses.”

“Dreamwarden,” Stygia says darkly. Both druids bow their heads. “Thank you for your report. We improve on total sweeped square kilometers with every test. If you have recommended targets, confer with Stormkettle.”

“Thank you, Captain,” they say. She hears them with supernatural senses as she boards the sleeping Legion Cruiser, her ears perking back of their own accord. 

“We have to go through Juli,” the young Biridran Raincover says, turning away. 

“It’s easier that way,” Lurosa says. “Juli is extremely kind.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t bring up Felora.”

“Felora can drool over alien cattle all she wants, she knows better than to cross that line…”

“You have more faith in orcs than I do.”

Stygia is bothered on her way back to her personal chambers. She has a desk there, and expects a gnome or two to show up with a nozzle redesign or something of that nature. She had deliberately chosen crew members who would be willing (and lingually capable) of working cross-faction. If this were to be a Horde or Alliance endeavor, it would be a tragic one. Azeroth’s efforts to heal space cannot, foundationally, include racism and classism. But putting disparate people together was always bound to come with some issues. 

One of Juli’s cleaning spiders zooms by her feet while walking down a hall, and Enna, Bengus’s daughter, runs by apologizing and cursing.

She is distracted by the sprinting dwarf when she enters her personal chambers. 

Illidan is there. Something brilliantly violet is in his hands, and he throws it and catches it a few times, sitting on the edge of her desk, before turning his head to acknowledge her. His wings have mussed up some of the papers. She closes the door behind her. 

The room has not changed much from its original form. It is still dark and wicked--simply better lit, and blue with Arcane instead of green with Fel. One of its walls is made of wood. The cruiser was not built for privacy, and most of its chambers had to be divided out into smaller rooms, with makeshift doors—adding bathrooms and plumbing has taken up a surprising amount of space, but a bathroom is not something Stygia needs. A projected window shimmers natural light into the room, since the place had almost no windows. Besides the bed (looking newly bought and used by no one but ghosts), the room shows inhabitance with several gleaming scientific instruments, specimen containers and sealed jars, scrolls and books, a Silvermoon magister’s magic staff (with glaring claw marks from a tight grip), deactivated warglaives, and a single miniature orange-leafed Sunstrider birch with perfectly cultivated foliage in the shape of cubes. There is an Azerothian Mouse in a glass tank far too large for her, decked out with soil and hiding places and things to climb. She (Stygia named her Leaf) is hiding, now. 

“Are we going to talk?” Illidan sneers, catching the glowing object again. 

Stygia walks over and catches the thing out of the air. It’s a small thing, a glowing purple keystone, fashioned to activate a portal via proximity. 

“Yes,” she says slowly. “If you are ready to apologize.”

He stands, and shakes his head no. “I have a Queen to kill. Are we going to plan, or am I going to do it myself?”

“If you’d please excuse yourself, I have a meeting I need to prepare for.” She puts the keystone in a drawer and sits at her desk.

Illidan opens the drawer and takes it back out. “If I hadn’t stolen this, we would have no way into the Garden,” he says. 

“You think that’s what I’m mad about?”

He breathes in. “...It isn’t?”

She collects the papers back together on her desk, hyper-aware of his presence looming over her. For a second, she blushes at the sight of a messy drawing she had scrawled a day ago, immediately after they had returned from their adventure into the hidden City. She covers it with a chart. She sighs. “The next time you want to pull something like that off, tell me beforehand? I almost ruined it for both of us. If I had known you were going to steal from those… elitists… Do you really think I would have protested? Even if it wasn’t a necessary key to infiltrate their coward’s bunker?”

The shadow of his wings deflate, and his head tilts. “It worked out,” he says, lowly. 

“We’ll see. I do think the Apprentice noticed. What was her name? Ba-Root.”

He departs from behind her and starts to slowly pace like a panther in front of her desk, hooves clattering onto the dark tile. “They hate us with or without an Apprentice’s input,” he says.

“Their ‘Doctrine’ probably tells them that all outsiders are lying. Probably the uncivilized ones in the City, too. I don’t think a single citizen has ever been allowed inside.”

He sniffs. 

“I’m sorry we couldn’t see the Queen,” Stygia offers. 

“The damned golems’ magic sensors were blown out by their private Well. If she was in there…”

Stygia remembers the main room of the Garden, one of five enormous chambers big enough for hills and orchards and lakes to fit within. She will never forget. It was more beautiful than a Suramar courtyard, even through the eyes of a golem. 

After the alien horde had sung for almost fifteen minutes, two of the Gardener aliens had finally emerged from the small door at the head of the amphitheater. They—Master and Apprentice, Ta-Naat and Ba-Root, with the moth-like gossamer wings and two lengthy arms signifying female, had brought Stygia and Illidan in the bodies of ancient golems through the most intricate Portal-gate Stygia has ever seen, and into the Garden’s central hub chamber. 

The place had been big enough to contain yet another city, but it was occupied instead by parks, gardens, leisure chambers of glass and pillow, and a massive, shallow, calm lake of an Arcane Well. 

And against the far wall, glittering with the swirling caustics of the Well’s vivid blues and purples, were hundreds of pods, within which were the sleeping and catatonic bodies of yet more Gardeners. 

Twenty Gardeners strong walked and flew and slithered the Garden. All of them replete with vividly colored clothes, and hair-fronds that grew un-gathered the way the non-Garden citizens stuck in the City outside the Garden’s singular and protected gate wore theirs. Stygia would trust none of them. 

But those pods… she can’t help but think the Queen is there, among them. If not, are those sleepers just as elitist and Doctrine-obsessed as the twenty Gardeners? Would awakening them be a boon or a curse? The only thing she could come away with, after flying their golem-bodies up the long shaft into the moon’s crust and waking up in their real bodies, is that they need more information. There are too many unknowns. 

“She’s there somewhere,” Stygia says. “I’m glad we could scout around. The Garden should be called the Arsenal.”

Illidan’s eyebrows twitch. “I think those weapons were meant for their own Citizens.”

She shivers, and nods. “Why are they fine with their Moon’s corruption? I guess if I lived in paradise…”

“If you lived in paradise, you would still try to fix the outside,” Illidan says quickly. 

“Perhaps.”

“They’re not worth protecting.”

“The Gardeners?” Stygia eyes the purple keystone radiating light from his clutch. 

“Yes. I should go in there myself.”

She stands. “You’d die trying something like that.”

“What do you propose, then? Do you want to befriend them?”

“We don’t have that kind of time.”

“Correct.”

“When we come back in a week,” she says. “I expect a trap.”

“Good instinct.”

“But… even if we can’t win our way onto their good sides by the sheer combined strengths of our ‘charisma’,” she says, smirking. “I know there is another way to go about this. Something that isn’t outright slaughter.”

He stops by a bookshelf and examines the spine of something that caught his eye. “You could aim your ‘gray magic’ down into the Moon,” he suggests with the nonchalance of a hunter planning to eradicate a rat infestation.

Her silence causes him to look over. She’s squinting at him, tapping a claw on her desk rhythmically. “Not in a billion years,” she finally says. "Not unless they were corrupted, at least…"

He smiles with satisfaction. She sits down, leans as far back in her chair as her bulky wings allow, and sighs. “We don’t have enough information. I’m going to try to learn more, ask around the City. The citizens have to know something. They must.”

Illidan regards her, walks up to her desk as hundreds of people before him had, and smoothly uncovers the messy drawing from beneath the chart with one claw. 

“You’re still good,” he says as she balks, the elvish skin of her face hidden (thankfully) by ruddy Demon scales blushes. 

It’s a drawing of the aliens. Female (two arms and two wings), and male (four arms) specimens, side by side. She tried to illustrate the way their three spidery legs twist together to meld into a snake’s tail, noting the naga-like way they prefer to ambulate, and the fierceness and battle-readiness that their three-legged form gives off. There is a beautiful rendering of their four-eyed face occupying the top corner. It’s messy—with shaking lines and hastily scrubbed shading—due to the claws of her Demon-hands, but she compensates with patience, and the results are still clear and legible (though the lettering is over-large). 

He hasn’t seen her draw since they practiced together under Ravencrest. 

“It’s harder than it used to be,” she says. 

His smile had been small, and it withers before her. He turns to leave, hesitates, then, in a gesture of good will, places the keystone on her desk above the drawing, causing the alien’s illustrated face to light up with reflective graphite. “Retrieve me when you go. Sooner, rather than later.”

“We have a firing in an hour,” she says, and when he opens the door to leave, the squeaking of a gnome’s voice (and the bored grumbling of a goblin, beneath it) travels down the hallway. He nods at Stygia and disappears down the hall. 

^  
12  
When their consciousnesses snap awake within the ancient golems, it is with clarity unparalleled. Georgia had improved their pairing stones—instead of random chips of ceramic scavenged from the abandoned city, metallic disks with three embedded crystals hover over their foreheads. But Georgia is not here. Vince Huckden and an enormous human Paladin were the only two to travel with the Demon Hunters. Vince had heartily volunteered to spare the other Mages from leaving their work. The Paladin, a tired and intimidating veteran named Phillip Stormwell, volunteered for reasons unknown. 

The Paladin is more than trustworthy. In his old age and sense of duty shared with the reliable Vince, he would not spread the secret of aliens with the other crew members of Dreamfoil. The aliens need to be dealt with carefully, and Stygia and Juli decided it was for the best if it was kept low-key, at least for now.

“Captain,” Vince says, watching the empty husks activate with breathing magic and play with their arms and senses. “We will keep watch.” Vince looks like he wants to say something else, and perhaps it is the blank faces of the alien golems that encourages it, because he regains his composure when he looks at their sitting, unconscious, Demonic bodies. He looks away. 

On the plummet down, Stygia regrets assigning them such a boring position. The barrier they had erected and reinforced would never let a Demon threat through, at least not the weak ones of Weaver. There is nothing to watch for. But this protected people cannot be without their gate. One does not befriend a snail by shattering its shell.

Halfway down, she closes her ‘eyes’ again, and ‘wakes up’ in her sitting body above. She does it out of boredom, she thinks, and she looks sleepily over at Illidan’s sitting body. The reflection of his Titan-crafted necklace gives her an excuse to look at his muscular body. Her vision is fuzzy this way, and she can barely move her head. They are surrounded by a nest of funereal urns and glittering sands.

Vince and Phillip are talking and looking out at the abandoned ruin of a city that is shadowed by the massive pyramid cradling it. Regiment something something, Battle of something something. 

She lolls her head with great effort back into place. Illidan’s eyes are flicking around, as though in a dream. Prescient suddenly of what she’s thinking—of the strength of her desire to brush his hair—she snaps ‘awake’ again, back into the golem’s consciousness.

If her golem had a throat, it would be going tight. A ghostly feeling of chest-discomfort spreads within her. I am a Demon Hunter, she thinks ruefully.

They land. The palanquin is gone. A day had passed since they last saw it abandoned in this hall. Did they bring the glass urn up, and see the desecration of their apparent holy place? Did they take it elsewhere in fear? Or are Stygia and Illidan, as walkers of Paradise, excused for such defilement?

“Stygia,” Illidan says, his voice clearer through the connection than it had been before, sounding more like his. She double checks that the gnomish translator is off.

“What?” 

“Hypothetical. Say we come to discover that this city is half-corrupted. They seal themselves in.”

She wishes she could emote with her body, but the golem does not come with facial features. “I knew this was coming...” she says. 

“I presume you have already asked yourself such questions,” he sneers. 

“You are right to presume.”

“So? Half of them have been Fel-corrupted, they seal themselves away. What do you do, lone Mage of the gray magic?”

They reach the end of the hall and stand beneath an array of mounted defensive weapons so disused as to be easily mistaken for sculptures. Before entering the thriving city, they turn their golem’s bodies toward one another. 

Stygia sighs, a strange noise coming from the ‘mouth’ of a rigid construct. “You know I would do the right thing. As soon as it became clear they wouldn’t budge, and the seal is a done deal… And I somehow know that, at the final point of contact, half of them were corrupted, and that there’s no telling how many are after... I would have to point my cannon into the planet’s crust and shoot. I would. They’d be like infants, but they’d be safe.”

“A fourth of them are corrupted, same settings.”

“I would shoot.”

“None of them are, but there’s a dread lord.” The smile in his voice from the beginning has completely disappeared. 

“They are utterly unreachable?”

“No portals, impervious barrier. Everything is warded. No messages in or out.”

“I don’t approve of such an unlikely hypothetical.”

He waves an arm in exaggeration toward the City. They can hear citizens going about their day, the alien language remaining untranslated by a switched-off pair of gnomish translators. What a way of life, to be so sealed off that the sky itself is as a myth. And the only exit seems to be a shaft that half of the population can barely ascend. 

Stygia sighs, and in crossing her golem’s arms, realizes all four have crossed themselves. “But to engage with it regardless… I would have to. I would. As uncomfortable as it is, I would.” Illidan chuffs in cruel approval. “But there’s another way I would rather go.”

“What would that be?”

“Gray magic wipes other magic. All other magic. My endeavor need not be ‘cannon or nothing’. In small amounts, such a place’s wards and barriers could be undone by gray magic, the city’s residents evacuated, and the dread lord slaughtered.”

Illidan’s golem watches her for a moment. 

“Any other hypotheticals?” she asks. 

He shakes his head ‘no’, and they finally enter the City. 

The people are not hard to find. They are, as a species, called the Eti-Ov, meaning “Student of Order”. The Eti-Ov have not fully occupied this hidden City, as it was built for a wildly varying population, or perhaps they have declined in number with the centuries. Whatever the case, the occupied parts are obvious by cleanliness, by drying linens, lit incense, hanging decoration, and a million other markers of civilization. 

The aliens watch the sacred golems hover through their streets and along their Arcane canals with reverence. It’s easy to believe they think them holy, by the way their apparent gods treated them. They have, indeed, been allowed into their Paradise. But the ones clamoring at a respectable berth like a crowd of fans aren’t the ones they’re necessarily looking for. 

They’re taller, having occupied ancient defense golems built for battle, and they see easily over the excited, happy crowds. There’s one. A female that draws two males into her house, not taking her eyes off of either golem for even a moment, before she slams the door to her home shut. 

There’s some. A group slithers quickly away, down an alleyway. A male trips over garbage in his haste to leave, and his friend helps him correct his snake tail. 

Most of the crowd exclaiming in the alien language look a certain way compared to the ones trying to hide and get away. Are these yet more castes? A subspecies, or a cultural group? The skin of the fearful ones is a less saturated magenta, and has a sort of glossiness to it. Additionally, a complex yellow-blue pattern runs from their necks down their torsos, and spirals around each leg. 

Whatever the case, they set to finding any one of their number who could be called a leader.

While they search the colorful starburst of a city, the thoughts that Stygia has been struggling to keep at bay begin to slip to the surface. She is glad that the golem does not emote. Frustrated, she focuses on the curious culture around her. But the question is resting in plain view. Am I in love again? It’s easy to lie, right now. It’s easy to say no when all she sees of Illidan is an ugly alien golem. She knows he is less than a meter from her in reality, but more than that, she knows her real, honest body is not much better than the golem she occupies. She hasn’t cared—hasn’t spared a single ghost of a thought for the beauty she lost. She’s not certain how to handle the feeling, other than to push it away. What is the point of fussing when such a thing cannot be changed? 

Demon Hunters go hand in hand with suppressing emotions. She’s well used to it. The thought occurs to her that she wouldn’t be able to trust him even if he shared a lick of her feelings, and it all goes down the same drain that everything else (despair, fury, happiness, nostalgia) goes.

It does not take long to find important members of this group of less trustful Eti-Ov. They ask an older male, unable to scatter the way his younger counterparts could, and they are brought with much reluctance into a place deep within the housing stacks near a spiraling vertical park. This part of the City looks different. Gone are the streams of incense, the glass containers carrying plants or Arcane fonts, and the strings of cards hanging from building to building. This place, instead, is characterized by the hundreds of layered staves of curious bone-like black material glinting in the artificial sunlight, each marked by pictographs, leaning against walls and poking out of drilled holes in the flagstone. The windows and doors are framed and shielded by thin fabric panes with black and white markings, and the canals of Arcane are totally covered by heavy masonry, such that the Arcane light that is such a constant everywhere else has been totally dampened. 

The largest housing stack, with a small garden of a plaza stretching out before it, seems like a holy place. It is crowded, filled with whispers and slithering alien tails. Thousands of miniature panes of black-and-white communicate importance to the two Demon Hunter golems. Within, the Eti-Ov named Kanr-Aern and Raek-Wa are not rulers, but they will have to do. 

Kanr-Aern is old. These citizens outside of the cloister of the immortal Garden age and die slower than an Azerothian human, but not by much. Her wings are brittle and cut short, useless except as a means of displaying status, and her hard carapace-like membranous skin is matt and colorless. 

Raek-Wa, too, is aged, but his four arms are brutally thick with undeniable strength. He wears the same black-and-white tabard that Kanr-Aern does, covering most of the gold threaded tattoos up, and he looms protectively behind her, a polearm in one hand, and two dirks in the others. 

Kanr-Aern holds her gaze with the golems using all four eyes. Raek-Wa is casting his outer pair around the room—which is, apparently, Kanr-Aern’s house, wide and flat, a room meant for both worship and council meetings—and many of their cultural group have joined, holding various cautionary weapons. 

“Why are you here, in our holy place, Demons?”

Illidan’s golem perks up, and looks at Stygia. 

“You know what a Demon is?” Stygia asks.

They trill and whisper. Kanr-Aern’s brittle wings flutter, and her people hush. “Evil,” she says. “Evil holding will over flesh, and leaving it behind as venom and gravel and slag. We do know what Demons are. They swallowed the world.”

“Your Fellow citizens,” Stygia starts falteringly, uncertain of the ground ahead. “They do not know what a Demon is.”

Raek-Wa taps the base of his polearm against the tile. Kanr-Aern looks at him, then she says, “Their Doctrine disagrees with the truth.” A young alien makes a snide remark. 

“Do you find that often happens, that other Eti-Ov believe things that aren’t true?” Stygia asks.

“Who are you to probe us this way?” Kanr-Aern says suddenly. “Agents of the Garden. Tools.”

“We are not tools,” Illidan says. 

“These bodies help us seek answers safely, from a distance—”

“Safely,” Raek-Wa barks in a voice high and sharp. “We ceased being safe when you pierced Hell’s Door.”

The golems look at each other. Stygia says, “We had to.”

“You had to,” the withering Kanr-Aern says, reclining further into her throne-like seat. Her voice is suddenly full of despair. Many of the Eti-Ov look over, their faces scrunched with worry for their leader. “It is the only breach, the only way to poison our Trials. You would trick us from our paths. Tear the afterlife away from us.”

The gathered crowd braces. Two of them split their tails into three legs, and point their weapons at the two golems. 

Stygia glances at Illidan, who twitches his golem’s head in acknowledgment, and they both hover lower and lower until the two golems are resting on the floor. They tuck their four arms in, just the way the inert golems had been found. 

A silence passes, full of the tension of gripped metal and ancient remembered fury for the beings that destroyed the surface of their moon.

“I can prove that we come in peace. That we’re here to help,” Stygia says. “We need your help. But I will help you, first. Please.”

“How could a Demon help?” Kanr-Aern asks. 

“We came here to test a new kind of magic,” Stygia starts. “We did not know, at first, that this moon had anyone living on it. Our new magic can clean Demonic magic completely off of a planet.”

The Eti-Ov aliens exchange looks. A young one, with hair-fronds bursting red out of a black hair clip, exclaims and looks at her friend. She almost slithers forward before her embarrassed friend stops her. 

“You seem to remember the evil of the surface. Maybe you remember how it came down, crashing through the sky? How the hounds chased people down? How it wilted flowers and made them bite? We can fix it… We already have fixed some of it. The surface of your moon can again be safe. Would you like that? For the evil to be cleansed?”

Kanr-Aern clears her throat, and rises a few inches in her seat. “‘A rip of green crawls through the sky. With a roar, it convinces the mountains to crawl alongside. With a snap, it commands the rivers to turn into snakes. It twists the woods and they follow behind. The rip of green dips below the horizon, and behind it, froths a land forever bloodied and maddened.’” The crowd listens in silence to the verse. “We remember Evil. The Trials, our paths into the afterlife, were never supposed to last forever. We remember this too—We remember the promises of the Queen.”

At the word ‘Queen’, the roomful of Eti-Ov raise their heads, eyes closed, for a moment. It is dead-quiet. Illidan and Stygia look at each other. He tilts his golem’s head as if to say Curious. 

Kanr-Aern stands. Raek-Wa supports her as she wobbles onto her snake’s tail. She descends from the raised stone platform, and stops a few meters before the two golems, directly beneath an intricate chandelier-like contraption bearing strings of colorful sharp beads and yet more black-and-white panels. The beads’ reflections color her desaturated and withered countenance, and she appears even more grand as a result. 

“Prove yourselves to us.”

“How?” Stygia asks, eagerly. 

“If you want to help us… we have long run out of copper (the gnomish translator almost fails to pick up the element name), and two of our sacred crops have perished to disease. Bring us copper, and bring us new seeds of these two extinct things most precious to us. Then we may confer openly... Perhaps we can help you in return.”

A dry hour and a half passes. Stygia gathers information (and stuffs as many materials and samples of the deceased diseased crops as she can fit into her golem’s storage chamber) about the problems the Seioni cultural group has suffered. Illidan takes the opportunity to scout as much as the city as he can. It is a vast place, and his golem is bulky, and the non-Seioni are a gregarious bunch, who stop him with absurd exclamations and annoying religious gestures. He manages to find their mines, and their impressive farms stacked upon each other. When he realizes their religious leader—the one called the Cultivator—has started looking for the wandering golem, he starts trying to actively avoid her.

Illidan begins to examine another cultural group. They seem deeply ambivalent about the supposed ‘holy’ golem’s presence—they are taller, chubbier, and colored in scratchy greenish shades of corroded copper, and wear looser clothing. The unique talismans around their necks and shoulders seem to represent native species on the planet. He watches the way they go into trances (tucking themselves away on high balconies, in alleyways among their peers, sleeping in the middle of gardens) with an incredulous sense of curiosity. 

He realizes what they’re doing just as Stygia discovers him hovering precariously over a high garden wall, being stared at by whispering Eti-Ov. 

“Illidan,” she starts. 

He lands next to her. “Are we leaving?” 

“Yes…”

They pause halfway up the impossibly long shaft, resting on one of the spiraling canals that has been empty of magic for eons. Using the golem-bodies isn’t tiring, but they can feel the way magic energy becomes exhausted, and it feels nice to let the things catch up after a stint of magical rocket jumps. 

“What were you doing?” Stygia asks. 

“Reconnaissance. Scouting. What we came for.”

“On top of a wall?”

“The Seioni aren’t the only cultural group. There’s another—green, lax, lazy. They don’t care about the rumored sacred golems.”

“Ah. You were spying on one.”

“You would too. They sleep. All of them. All of the time.”

“Why?”

“...They’re Dreaming.”

The head of Stygia’s golem vibrates as she tries to express surprise. “That’s good news. The Worldsoul...” the words ‘world soul’ echo down the shaft. 

They’re lost in thought when they reach the top. But it apparent, as soon as they awaken in their real bodies and catch the rune disks that had been hovering above their foreheads, that the two human men were in the middle of something important. The large funereal chamber is tense. 

“Captain,” Vince whispers. He barely turns to acknowledge her. They’re staring out, down the straight empty canal past their Arcane barrier, where the massive open doorways of the pyramid glow with the day’s sunlight, and Illidan’s parked starship casts a long shadow. Vince motions them over with a quiet hand. Stormwell, the enormous armored Paladin, looks grim, with his jaw set tightly. 

They notice immediately, and use the spilled ash of the funereal urns to damper their hoofbeats against the stone tile. They nearly walk through the barrier, but Illidan instantly stops her, a clawed hand splayed out in front of her path. The gesture is quiet and brief—neither human notices—and Stygia stays by the two humans in the relative safety of the barrier. Stygia swallows hard. Being so safe is going to take some getting use to—instincts need to be ignored, instincts she hadn’t considered would be a bother until now.

Illidan paces out, quiet as the night, looking off to the right, his ears perking this way and that. He instantly stops mid-stride. His glaives remain hitched, which offers the trio some comfort. 

“Report,” Stygia whispers, close to Vince Huckden’s ear. 

He whispers back, with breath that is strongly minty for whatever reason, “We heard talking. Footsteps. Metal clanging. Shouts. Very far away, somewhere in the pyramid. Baaarely heard it.”

Illidan starts walking back after a few more tense moments. He doesn’t look away from the area to the right of the gate—this time, seemingly at a fixed point in the far distance. He’s almost to the barrier when a different noise catches the attention of all four people. The Paladin draws his sword, but both Demon Hunters keep their weapons hitched. The noise is coming from within the shaft.

Stygia and Illidan peak over the edge. It’s an alien—she’s flying with fluttering fairy’s wings, approaching fast. 

The Demon Hunters look at each other. Stygia glances at all the spilled ash and destroyed urns, then she raises a clawed hand, and she looks at Vince. Vince gathers her meaning slowly, but eventually horror dawns on his face, and he darts around for a moment. 

“Follow,” he whisper-shouts, and the Demon Hunters flee out of the Arcane barrier and into the closest abandoned door they can fit into, flash the magic disks onto their foreheads, and come back to life in a snap as the two golems. As golems, they wait before the shaft. Illidan’s head swivels continuously back and forth. Whatever he saw is bothering him. 

Phillip Stormwell sheaths his sword and waits uncomfortably. “Should I…?” he starts, but then the alien woman is there, transparently exhausted from the long continuous ascent. 

She’s Seioni—she has the golden tattoos. More than that, she was the young red-fronded girl that had happily exclaimed when Stygia had explained the Evil-cleansing capabilities of her magic. She takes one look at the spilled funereal ash, and instead of becoming horrified, she splits her tail into three legs, as though too disgusted to put the bulk of her tail down in it. 

“Hi,” she manages to say, through her tiredness. “I’ve never been here. Well. I guess nobody really comes here. Least of all a Seioni.” She clutches her two fore-legs spidery knees in tiredness, and shivers from strain. 

Stygia falters, still surprised by the bravery and unexpectedness. “Hello young one,” she says. 

“What the hell?” the young Eti-Ov says, craning her posture to see past Illidan’s golem. The Paladin smiles a pained and confused smile. She freezes. “Is that an alien? Wait... is that what you guys look like?”

“Sort of,” Stygia says, turning to see the human male. “We look… a little scarier than he does. Well. I should introduce—” she clears her throat, and it startles the exhausted girl. “I am Stygia. This is—”

“Illidan, yeah I remember. And that one?”

“Phillip Stormwell.”

“TWO names,” the girl exclaims, breathing in too much and then coughing. “I’m Heurt-Impe. Hi. Hello.”

Stygia looks down. “Sorry about the mess, uh. We didn’t know there was going to be a graveyard when we tried to open the doors.”

“Grave yard… Yard.” She laughs. “It’s where Followers collect the ones best at lying. You know…. well wait, maybe you don’t. I forgot what we’re supposed to hide.”

Illidan’s golem displays a hint of his lack of patience for people like this—youthful goofball types—by turning around and exiting the Arcane barrier totally, swiveling his golem’s head toward the right and scanning. The Paladin steps to the side, and looks passively after him. Stormwell yelps when he looks back and sees the short bug-eyed alien skittering up to him. 

“You don’t have to tell us anything, we won’t be harassing you with questions,” Stygia says. She smiles on the inside—is this girl an alien teenager? 

Heurt-Impe splays out the three fingers of her hands, and makes a delighted trilling noise when she sees the Paladin’s five fingers doing the same. Stormwell is doing fine, despite his obvious dread of misstepping in a foreign situation. Heurt-Impe freezes suddenly, staring past the Paladin, at the brightly glowing gates to the outside world. What could she be thinking about?

The young Eti-Ov seems to spring with realization, and she turns to Stygia. “Hi, so, can I see it? The magic you do?” 

Stygia pauses. It’s not a good idea to bring her to the gates, just now, when the temple’s safety is suddenly in question. But tomorrow… They could clean the place before the city—the surface city itself, and the canyons before it forever manic with crawling evil. They could do it with an audience. 

“Come back tomorrow afternoon, Heurt-Impe,” Stygia says. “It is not safe in here right now. But we will make it safe, and then we will Demonstrate. You can bring anyone you want.”

The girl looks back at the shaft, then back at Stygia. “You sure I can’t see right now?”

“I am. It takes a lot of set-up.”

The alien girl skitters up to the very edge of the barrier, flitters her wings, and crosses her arms. “That’s the local star?” she asks. “Our clocks supposedly follow its cycle… Is it really that bright?”

“It seems brighter from inside here, but you adjust to the light while within it.” 

Illidan’s golem comes to a rest outside of the house they had hidden their true bodies within. He stares at Stygia’s golem, no doubt brimming with impatience. 

“I know your wings must be tired, but we must insist that you go home. We’re still assessing the safety of this place, as well as the strength of the barrier. Please do not return while we are away. We don’t know what kind of evil lurks this palace.” 

Her strictness and authority manage to translate to the alien girl, who looks between Stygia and Stormwell falteringly, then she rushes back to the Paladin’s side. “Can I have some of that gray stuff on your head? I want to prove I met the aliens.”

“Stuff—my hair? Hmm,” Phillip looks at Stygia’s expressionless golem, and she nods with its beakish head, doing her best approximation of a shrug. He snatches a bit—hardly any—and hands it to the girl, who produces thread from nothing (to Stygia’s amazement), tying the tiny bundle together and shoving it into a buttoned pocket. She turns back to look at them one last time—lingering on the human and his strange nose. 

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Heurt-Impe says. She makes a strange symbol with her interlocked hands and wing-thumbs, exclaims “Promise!”, and falls like a stiff board backwards into the pit. 

By the time Stygia has begun to awaken in her true body, Illidan had already stood up and occupied the doorway. 

She squints through a light headache, and get to her feet. Vince has picked back up his habit of stink-eyeing Illidan when the Demon Hunter isn’t looking. 

“Stygia,” Illidan says without looking at her, his ears trained in one direction. “There are people here.”

“No. We scanned.”

“They evaded your scry.”

Vince pipes up, “The only thing that could do that is the Void.” He had begun the sentence with heavy, obvious doubt, and ended it with the twinges of terror. 

“There are other ways,” Illidan drawls, glancing derisively at the human. 

“Weaver is a treasure trove of secrets,” Stygia says, rubbing her temples. They leave the abandoned house. When they store the golems behind the Arcane barrier, Vince adjusts the settings to disallow anything from moving in or out, not just Demons, with the exception of humans, a temporary measure that will just have to do for now. 

“Something could have already sneaked down there,” the Paladin says. They can only hope otherwise. 

Carrying the payload of dead seeds from within Stygia’s golem, they carefully, quietly leave the temple city.

“They fought each other,” Illidan says lowly, and only Stygia hears. 

She trains her Demon Hunter’s eyes toward the right as they walk. It is far—almost a kilometer away—but there are, indeed, signatures of death and bloodshed. 

13  
Dreamfoil hovers like a grudge over the abandoned alien pyramid, so early in the day that the sunrise has only just begun to redden the horizon. To the crew, Juli had framed it like sight-seeing, but the Mages know better. They huddle over their instruments, drape their sleepy eyes over incoming data, and try to fit together pieces of a jigsaw not meant for Azerothian eyes. Illidan’s ship (“Sacrifice”, Stygia had suggested as a name. It’s on-the-nose… but he hadn’t contradicted her, and later, when it showed up on her console, it had been renamed from “Titan-STARSHIP-TASKMASTER”) orbits the upper diamond of the pyramid, using scryers perfectly made by the titans themselves. 

This is the second time they have scried the pyramid. Illidan’s ship should find something if they, again, fail to. They wait for him to send data while they pore over anything that could be considered an anomoly.

Stygia is at the Helm. She watches the Arcane hologram with slight frustration. A storm is coming, crawling over a mountain ridge, and snapping with Fel lightning. 

Juli makes a loud noise, like a small wolf’s growl. “I know Demon Hunter eyes are good, but are you certain you didn’t see things? The likelihood of us finding nothing—” the gnome goes quiet when Georgia elbows her. “...Is Sacrifice finding anything?”

Stygia holds up a claw. Sacrifice stops circling, and starts to zoom off toward the horizon (the one without the monstrous thunderhead, thankfully). Stygia closes her eyes, sighs heavily, and starts to take Dreamfoil in Illidan’s direction. 

Illidan says nothing over the communicator, and sends not a single bit of data to anyone. 

“Whatever tech they have must be impressive,” Stygia announces. “Drop it. Focus on your assignments.” 

The Helm room starts to mutter as Mages stand to stretch, leave the room, and ask each other questions. 

“I’ll be in my lab,” Juli says. “If I were younger…”

“If you were younger, I still wouldn’t let you go in there again,” Georgia says darkly. “You’re too flighty for combat.”

“‘And too knowledgeable and important to lose, Oh Ms. Wonderful and Intelligent Juli Stormkettle!’” the gnome squeaks, laughing. 

“It was implied…” 

Sacrifice is a multi-talented craft. It can assess all of a planet’s threats. It can warp from anywhere to just about anywhere else. And if Illidan asks it to look for ores on a planet’s surface, it does. But it cannot mine, and neither can Dreamfoil, and thus the crew members put their best and brightest together in the laboratory to draw up a way to secure enough copper ore to impress the aliens, without specifying necessarily that it is, indeed, for aliens at all. 

“It’s for an ancient gate. It needs to be fed copper—an awful lot of pure copper—in order to open,” Stygia lies. 

“—And, and,” Juli adds, stumbling over herself, “All of the copper has to be brought down a kilometer-long shaft! Without the use of portals! Yep. No portals.” 

The ship’s resident genius goblin begins deliberations by shouting, “Whaddaya mean, no portals? Eh. We got this, right crewwies?”

Stygia answers as many questions as she can (mostly about the kilometer-long shaft) before walking over to the second group that had gathered in Juli’s laboratory. This second group, composed mostly of Druids and other healers, stand hunched over a pile of alien dirt and seeds. Some of them, having never stepped foot in Juli’s lab before, are transparently distracted by the specimen tanks lining both walls, things which used to imprison the ex-residents’ victims, but now house mana wyrms, petrified examples of local fauna, planters filled with alien flora, and a single half-corrupted grell-imp (named, according to a placard, “Dandelion”). 

“Report,” she says, as the huddled group quiets with her presence. 

“The cleansing of these sick seeds is fully possible,” Dreamwarden Lurosa says with a genuine smile. “It is a mere matter of time. We’re simply deciding what reference seeds to gather, and who shall do the gathering.”

“The crops will not be changed by the process?” Stygia asks. 

“Not unless the disease mutates. They are alien, so there are no guarantees, but such a thing is unlikely.”

Stygia nods, and leaves the laboratory. She has found that the best way for her to lead is to ask few questions, be available, and then, to simply tuck herself away, where her wings aren’t in danger of knocking something over, and her horns and claws aren’t unnerving people. 

Sacrifice had chaperoned Dreamfoil over a sheer crag. The copper ore is half-exposed by an ornery fault. Hot water pools gather in stepping-stone shapes, cascading down the sheer cliffs and trickling their boiling liquid down its sides. It’s a beautiful site, even though it is devoid of life. They have a view of one of the planet’s tenacious jungle biomes from here, peeking out from low mountains like Un’goro Crater. Through her personal room’s faux-window, she watches Illidan’s ship spirit itself toward the jungle, over the ridge, and out of sight. 

The ore extraction and preparation takes four hours—going much faster than Stygia had thought, though she never had more than fifteen minutes without a question over the comm. Using the lone dwarvish machine they had brought capable of drilling sample-cores into a planetary surface, the ground team had strategically (and breathily—Weaver may be breathable, but the air sure is thin) core’d a significant chunk of the Copper deposits such that, with the coaxing of Felora’s shamanistic might, the entire thing could be broken off from the earth around it. 

The preparation was another story. Their sample was pure, for a deposit, and they were told it needn’t be smelt-ready, but a great deal of cleaning had to be done. That’s where the Mages came in. Georgia instructed and performed the ritual—lifting the several-tonne chunk of earth into the air, then whipping dirt and impurities off with self-contained heat jets. It was impressive. The resulting chunk of copper ore actually gleamed its iconic copper color. They shoved it onto the ship’s hangar via portals. 

The seeds, under Dreamwarden Lurosa’s careful and patient guidance, had improved in health so much that they had started to sprout. With a thoughtful touch, each of them were placed in their own adorable little ceramic pot, and fastened with multi-colored bows. He wasn’t even told what the seeds were for—but he did this anyway. Stygia suspects he’s trying to convince her to seek therapy, to allow him to help her, but then again, people like that don’t tend to have ulterior motives.

We’re on schedule, Stygia thinks. She’ll keep pushing until the Seioni have properly seen what she can do, and it will happen today.

Now that everyone is focused on the issue of getting several tonnes of copper down a kilometer-long vertical shaft, and at least one of the tasks given to her by the Seioni aliens was completed, Stygia, playing with the glowing purple keystone in her claws, picks up her gnomish communicator and opens a personal line to Illidan. She hopes his device is even on. He had taken the communicator as a child accepts medicine, planning to hide the medicine in a bookcase rather than eat it. 

“Illidan,” she says. A moment passes. 

“Stygia,” he responds. She hears noise behind him. 

“We’re heading back soon.”

“On my way,” he says. Is he in the jungle?

“Where are you?” she asks after another moment. 

“Takes more than a few seconds…”

“Are you outside?”

He doesn’t respond. Then: “You should tell your Demon Hunters not to approach the jungles.”

She puts her face in her hand. “Why?”

Minutes pass. 

She gives up, heads to the Helm room, and pilots the ship back to the base camp, where Illidan’s ship has already been parked. 

They reach Stygia’s personal quarters nearly at the same time. He ducks his head to enter after her. The doors close, and she stands behind her desk with a clawed hand on her hip. 

“I did not enter the jungle. Let me start with that. I was in Sacrifice, took her in low; I am not a fool. I wanted to see if I could prove myself right.”

“And Demon Hunters shouldn’t go there...?”

He nods. “The Dreamers, the lazy ones. (“Yes?” Stygia says with a raised brow) When they sleep, they fling themselves into the minds of animals across the moon. I saw them trying to understand my ship, where other animals ran in terror.”

She stiffens. I haven’t had the time to think about them. “They appear to be the only beings able to breach the heavy wards and magic of the hidden city and its gate-kept Garden.” She thinks, then gasps. “Yes. No Demon Hunter should be seen. Even if they have forgotten what a Demon looks like, the Dreamers shouldn’t sound the alarm that danger is afoot.” She looks ruefully over her reports, brushing a knuckle to move one out of the way of another. They’re all about the Seioni. 

“If anyone actually knows what a Demon looks like, it is them,” he says, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall to Stygia’s left. 

She sits. Her plans are half-drawn. “I wonder if such a door, in Dreaming, was left open on purpose, or out of ignorance?”

“The second one. You know how these people work.” He picks up a specimen jar of hers, where a shriveled earth elemental the size of a dwarf’s fist hovers in a hardened liquid, and examines it. “Your family.”

“...My family would rather have died than give up on Azshara, on what they already knew.

“In any case. Illidan. I have to ask: did Sacrifice find anything?”

“Yes,” he says simply.

“And…?”

“Life. There are aliens. But they are different from the Eti-Ov. Smaller. Harder to track—my ship couldn’t understand why. The material of the pyramid doesn’t help, but it doesn’t answer every question. The Fel was there. But in what form…” he shakes his head. 

In big, sloppy lettering, she writes new information about the local life in a packet of other notes she’s made on Weaver, regretting somewhat her obsession with those people most likely to help them understand the situation. 

I don’t have time to worry about every alien. 

She picks up and straightens a stack of parchment, then she shifts into Captain-mode to leave no room for protest. “I would like you, Kor’vas Bloodthorn, and Jace Darkweaver to threat-assess them. We see a ruin of a city in its bulk, but there is a kilometer of pyramid above the gate and shaft, and whatever lives there seems dangerous. The catch… you should keep to the shadows. If you can see them without being seen, that information is valuable, with the added bonus that the threat—should it indeed be other sapience which isn’t corrupted—remains calm in the belief that they aren’t being invaded by Demons. If you can figure out a way to bar the threat from the gate and shaft, that would be ideal. If we do end up showing our capabilities off to that Seioni teenager later today, I want to be damn sure she’s safe.”

He squints. His face is unreadable, but she suspects he resists going accompanied. He sets down the specimen jar where he found it.

“They need experience in situations like this, they aren’t used to tiptoeing around a problem.”

“I am not their teacher.”

“Not anymore, this is true.” She keeps going before he can protest. “If you lose sight of them, fine. You can pretend they aren’t there. I am simply interested in having Demon Hunters capable of observing, rather than charging, glaives-out.” She spreads out her hands and claws in a gesture of “good enough?” 

“Fine.” 

“We’re getting closer. Your Queen will be dead in under a week.”

He eyes the purple keystone. She has it under the claw of her index finger, playing with its weight like a spinning top. 

“If this goes nowhere, I’m stealing your gray magic and blasting the entire Garden,” he growls. 

She laughs. “It won’t come to that. They have their assignment—I believe they’re both waiting outside of Sacrifice. Today, the Seioni will come to trust us, and that young one must be safe when escorted to the gates of the pyramid. That is the objective.”

He leaves without another word. Tension leaves her body. She is furious to discover that, against her wishes, it has begun to react as a being infatuated. Something in her chest—as sick with Fel as it is now—twists when he leaves the room. 

Something within his own chest betrays him. He longs, despite himself, for the days he and Stygia had spent hunting Demons together, as mere Mages, ten thousand years ago. But she has precious and fragile information, and he has his tasks, and so two old students of his must tiptoe at his tail instead. 

Illidan, while in a headlong fury, frightens a gnome. The little engineer spills a folder of papers all over the thin hallway, which Illidan promptly steps on. The gnome curses under her breath as he turns the corner. He exits Dreamfoil like a bullet. Jace and Kor’vas take one look at him, charging with a fury of Fel energy toward them, then enter Sacrifice. They can tell that he’d leave them behind the second he steps aboard. 

It is almost noon. The local star bakes Weaver’s thin atmosphere. The sister moon is visible on the horizon, barely visible through Weaver’s strange near-purple skies. They reach the pyramid quickly. He is thinking of Tyrande when his hooves meet the cracked tile floor of the pyramid’s abandoned city, and the two Demon Hunters dash to keep up with him. 

These thoughts are foul, he thinks. This feeling is what ruins a hunter. 

He stops halfway down the abandoned magic canal, where the skeletons have been pushed to the sides, leaned against walls, and in one case, stolen totally by Georgia, and looks to his left. Jace and Kor’vas had tailed him well, making not a sound. He eyes them. They look at each other, and start to move, traveling down what used to be a main thoroughfare, with its own canal. Their path is blocked ahead by several collapsed housing-stacks, but they can surely figure it out. 

Illidan continues on until the quiet humming of the Arcane barrier has replaced the sounds of the pyramid’s empty, slow breathing, earthy settling noises, and the occasional trickle of water. To the left of the shaft’s barrier, an extremely dark alleyway yawns. He starts down it. 

She wields this responsibility well. Of course she does. She isn’t poisoned by the politics of home, doesn’t carry prejudices that would get in the way of her work. Neither does she carry a fool’s heroism. She understands the stakes. She can make the sacrifices necessary, and she would remain unbroken by that action repeated ten fold. If she had to wipe the memories clean of ten thousand just to make sure one powerful Demon fails to enslave and corrupt them, she would do it, and she would do it over and over. 

He has convinced himself that he must threat-assess her. Her hidden formula—whatever it may be—could be used against every living creature, in the wrong hands. It is of utmost importance that she is the right person to know it. Illidan steps over another skeleton—there’s a heap of them in this nook of the alleyway, a family that failed to get away perhaps?—and he fails to realize that she has been, simultaneously, over-analyzing him. He is the right person to guard the Throne, to accomplish its Tasks. 

His only issue, she writes, as Dreamfoil’s modified air-conditioning system coughs on overhead, is that he is so willing to potentially throw his life away before enough information is gathered. “Whether this is an issue of the depression so rampant in the line of work that is Demonhunting, or, truly, the hotheadedness and arrogance he has always had, remains to be seen. It must be both. Ten thousand years,” she finishes, drifting off into thought. The foolishness of elves have nearly cost Azeroth her life on countless occasions. 

She fails to realize that she is guilty of the same problem. Throwing, not her life away, but precious progress toward other ends in the name of a single goal.

There is no threat to assess, Illidan admits. The wall of the pyramid to his right opens up unexpectedly. There is a destroyed temple to his right, with a massive intact column at its center, reaching fully from floor to ceiling. He suspects that the column has a staircase within leading to the pyramid’s heretofore unexplored upper story. 

As long as she keeps herself safe, she could really do it. She could really wipe Fel from the universe. Not with permanence—but it could be like the Legion never made their warpath across the stars. Fel would become as any other sphere of magic; Occurring naturally, never imposing itself over the other spheres.

Something foul bares its teeth in the back of his mind. It isn’t the Demon blood, as he initially suspects (and wants to believe). It is something altogether separate. Something he wonders if Stygia has realized, then realizes instantly that… surely… she already knows. 

He stops. He stares without sight at the ruin of the temple. He sees and preternaturally senses the blood on the floor leading into the broken-down doors. 

Something hot occupies his face, his cheeks. One day, she will be a Task of mine, he admits. 

There’s no going around it. What she plans to do will catch the attention of some great power out there. She will, eventually, be caught. She will, eventually, be corrupted, and her formula will be used to devastate, and he will have to find her by order of the Throne. 

She knows this. She may believe he had already come to that conclusion. They are both immortal. They will live forever, until killed, and unless she makes a foolish mistake, and unless Illidan faces a foe he cannot surmount... the end is clear. The last chapter of her life will be signed by his hand. 

Am I okay with this? 

Before he can sort out what he even means (Is he okay with allowing her to currently live this life now, is it worth the saving of untold planets if she may be used against other ones? Or is he, personally, ready to end her life—is he prepared to deal with how fast he would answer ‘Yes’ despite it being her of all people?), he, too brazenly, rushes to the feet of the ruined temple, a shadow of a being jittering with power and energy and the refusal to stay still long enough for the thoughts to trap him down. 

He does not see the beings watching him. He couldn’t. But they recognize the thing that slaughtered the Imp mother.

14  
Full reports, when given by Demon Hunters, are always given in the form of speech. Chaos magic may produce some devastating feats of power, strength—causing some of the most destructive forces ever recorded, with more energy than what is purported to be at the center of most stars—but the side effect is that those careful feats of finesse are long-gone. Writing is hard. If one sculpts, better make it large, as the wittling of a little keepsake is nigh-impossible. They leave such things to Mages and artists, now. 

Stygia hasn’t come to terms with this fact—not fully—but she has the sense to leave the writing to someone else, at least in situations like these. Vince Huckden has a quick and careful hand, according to Georgia (whose speedy scribe-skills were lost with the Forsaken rebirth, and looks with jealousy over Vince’s nimble pen when they’re in the lab together). He sits in her too-large chair to record the facts, as Stygia stands, leaning with one hand on her desk, the other occupied by the glowing violet keystone. 

Jace eyes the thing with curiosity, and Kor’vas clears her throat. “I cannot say with certainty.”

“Illidan left without a word, huh,” Stygia asks, about as surprised as a sleeping sloth. 

“Yep. Yes.” 

“For the record, it seems like it would have been obvious, if he had been noticed,” Jace says in his deep, creamy voice. 

“The entrances were marked by runes? All of them?”

“Yes. There were six, in total. The pyramid’s staircases are mirrored on the other side.”

Stygia taps a claw to her chin, nodding in approval. We’ll undo the trap runes later. These beings shall be studied like any other. “Describe the upper story.”

“We had brief glimpses, at best,” Kor’vas says apologetically. “It was greener, though. Gardens, planters, layered parks. Overgrown. Hard to navigate. The houses were smaller, more destroyed… but they were lived-in.” 

“And the aliens… you said they were smaller?” Stygia can dance the keystone across her knuckles, the way she used to do, when her fingers were small and thin and competent, but anything more complicated is impossible to pull off. 

“A bit taller than your average dwarf,” Jace offers.

“Stygia,” Kor’vas starts. “I think they shapeshift. All of them. Druidism, shamanism, I don’t know what manner of magic, but they all meld into the form of these snakish creatures, into weird birds, into…” she puts her hand to her mouth. “Feral rabbit-cats?” 

Stygia immediately remembers the Dreamers in the city, the way they can throw their Dream-selves into the bodies of alien animals on the other end of the continent, through the most heavily-warded construct Stygia has ever seen. This magic, perhaps it has something to do with how difficult they are to scry and scan for? If this business with the Seioni doesn’t work out, these Dreamers are extremely interesting.

“Their true forms, describe—”

“That’s the issue, though. My apologies for interrupting, but their true forms seem arbitrary, like it’s all the same to them. Their signatures,” she squints, and the green blaze hidden behind the wrap over her eyes lessens in intensity, “they don’t change the way a night elf Druid’s do.”

Stygia eyes Kor’vas. The stub-horned Demon Hunter is troubled. Stygia thought she was annoyed at Illidan’s disappearance, but perhaps there is something else...

“They’re a fair bit more beetle-like.” Stygia had finished her drawing of the aliens, and saw it fit to show the pair of hunters. If rumors of alien life do get out now, Stygia has stopped caring. Jace looks the illustration up and down. “Their outer pair of eyes are more out,” he points, “and they’ve got these hard crests? No hair-things.”

“Some had hair-things,” Kor’vas corrects. 

“And their skin was dark, and extremely… gemstone-like. Opalescent!” he nods. “Sparkling with hidden colors breaching through darkness. None of them had wings, though, except when transforming...”

“They sound beautiful,” Stygia remarks, and Vince hums a noise of affirmation as he writes. 

The pair look at each other. “I’m glad you made me bring a translator,” Kor’vas says. “They were arguing about something. Everyone who had been to the shaft… they knew. There’s in-fighting. I think some of them want to reach out, and others have hurt them to keep their people ‘safe’ from us. They said something about ‘rescued ancestors’. You were brought up, Stygia. You and your green eyes.”

Stygia watches Vince write for a moment. She has an old red eye-wrap in a drawer, somewhere, but hasn’t worn it for a long time. As terrible as the Nathrezim influence within her is, as twisted as he made her appearance, at least her eyes can handle the world wrap-less. The Fel leaking smoke out of them is very obvious, though. She sniffs. “Corruption. Did you sense it?”

“No. There was another floor, but it wasn’t safe to go up, at least without being seen.”

“You did the right thing by using caution,” Stygia says. “So none of them were corrupted?”

“Correct,” Jace says. 

“Why?” Kor’vas asks. “Besides the state of Weaver. Do you think they should be?”

“Illidan’s ship thinks so,” Stygia says. 

Kor’vas stifles a smirk, amused that he had hidden information from the crew of Dreamfoil. “Well. Everything is warded. If they try to descend, they will be frozen, as will anyone who touches them.” Kor’vas shrugs. “We’d better get back soon, though.”

Stygia nods. “The engineers and Mages will be flooding the pyramid en masse to get that copper down where it needs to go. I want every Demon Hunter patrolling the perimeter, meanwhile. Keeping each other safe, and keeping the workers safe. We depart in an hour. Tell the hunters.”

Vince punctuates the meeting with an exaggerated period, and looks around the room with the same face he always wears around the Captain: the neutral mug of a human man ready to follow any command, especially the monotonous kind. His true personality, like for many of their crew, is kept carefully compartmentalized around Stygia. 

Once the door shuts behind them, Stygia relaxes into her desk-chair, picks up her communicator, and opens the private line again. 

“Illidan,” she says. 

There is no response. She waits for a while. If he had something important, he would bring it up. Otherwise… she waits for Phillip Stormwell. They have a meeting, next, and Stygia would very much like the Paladins to stick around at the head of the shaft. Maybe that Seioni teenager (and whoever she brings, if anyone) would be delighted to see more humans—hopefully the draenei don’t evoke memories of the Eredar.

The beings upstairs spoke about me... Well, we’ll soon prove to them our good intentions.

The solution her crew had reached, over a long debate involving a lot of loud declarations, clarifications, and hastily scrawled blueprints, is a messy one, for sure. But, given the circumstances, and tight restrictions, it will do more than fine. 

Bengus had taken charge of the operation initially, until Enna, his clever daughter, had had her own eureka moment. The dwarves oversee the components as they exit Dreamfoil’s wide-open hatch, pass through the gates of the alien Pyramid, and come to a strained rest by the shaft’s Arcane barrier. The Mages all but collapse—bringing those things over via telekinesis hadn’t been easy, considering the impressive weight and mass of the copper ore chunk. Bengus smiles through his considerable dwarvish beard, eyes twinkling, as Enna doles out instructions. 

Juli skitters up to Stygia—it takes a long moment, since she started all the way in the shaft’s chamber, and Stygia is leaning against the open hatchway of Dreamfoil, but Juli enjoys the rush of her high-speed mobility chair. The Captain gets the feeling she’s enjoying having so much open space to zoom around in. 

She slows dramatically once she sees the look on Stygia’s face (what look specifically, Stygia herself is uncertain. She knows she has Resting-Beast-Face). 

“No one’s on the way up,” Juli says. 

Stygia nods, and starts, cautiously, down the canal toward the shaft chamber. Juli, not knowing what to do with herself, walks alongside for a moment, then breaks into another run back toward the shaft chamber. 

The pyramid is busy—much busier than it had ever been before. People are talking, laughing, commanding, clarifying, and it all echoes off the ruined stacks and thin organic columns. Somebody shrieks when they see a corrupted rat-alien, and somebody else makes a big clamor of scaring the critter off. Paladins crowd around the barrier before her. She looks to her left. The signatures of Demon Hunters snake through the city in an odd mockery of a living city’s activity. Safe. It’s safe. 

We’re getting closer and closer.

The barrier had gone through a few different iterations. It is stronger than ever, now, and much pickier. Georgia had her apprentice manually enter every specific being allowed in or out, such that those creatures couldn’t simply waltz through, no matter the nature of their shadow magic or Druid shape. It also means that the barrier would disallow the passage of the Eti-Ov, unfortunately. But at least they’re safer. Stygia passes through it, uncomfortable at the electricity washing over her scales. Somebody had cleaned up in here—had swept the alien ashes, pushing the mess of broken glass, ash, bead, and ceramic plates to the very edges of the room. It’s better lit now—like the rest of the relevant part of the pyramid—and smells a little less like must and a little more like the rest of Weaver. The golem’s chest’s chamber is full with carefully stacked seeds and the soil they grow in. She sits, puts the golem plate over her forehead, and wakes up in the alien construct’s body a meter or so away. It is heavy—heavier than when she had first brought it up with the seeds and dirt—but operable. 

The trip down isn’t as bad as the stop-and-start trip up the shaft, but it still allows a little too much room for bad thoughts. Emotional thoughts. She forces them back. 

“No one is around,” Stygia announces through the comm’s open channel. She hears a ghoulish noise echo from up the shaft—a few people cheering gargled by the spinning canals around the shaft’s circumference—and she waits, keeping watch down the long hallway, where ancient weapons point directly at her, covered in dust, yet glinting beautifully. 

The device lands where it aught. The Arcane bubble it rode down on bursts, cushioning the device’s fall. Its payload, so to speak, a large and ramshackle dish as wide as Stygia’s outstretched handspan, articulates upward, and then it waits. 

“Captain Stygia, ye should git yer golem movin`. In about twenty seconds, ye might nae have a golem tae speak of.” Enna’s voice, carrying wise advice. She hovers far from the device, down the hall. Some citizens have crept up to the gates. They poke their four-eyed heads around corners. 

“Stay back. I’m— (here, the discomfort of taking credit for her crew’s work catches in her throat)— I’m bringing a gift to the Seioni. But it’s very, very dangerous. Stay there.” She spreads the golem’s four arms far past her body in a great big X. The aliens chirp to one another, making apparently affirmative gestures, and huddling to the wall behind the gates more closely.

The ore comes clamoring down. Enna’s design immediately hops to work. It doesn’t matter how lopsided the load of ore is, as it is thrown and pushed and heaved into the shaft. Enna’s device beams its magic straight up, actively course-correcting all of the ore so that it doesn’t either destroy or get caught on the spiraling canals. The harder part—with a loud waving noise, it causes the ore closest to the device, on its way down the shaft being pulled headlong by gravity, to slow, and it causes the ore furthest to speed up, such that all of it clumps together. The hardest part arrives. In the seconds before its own demise, the device’s vast fan-like body vibrates, and when the ore—tonnes and tonnes of copper ore—finally collides with the machine, it explodes (Stygia cringes at the loud sound ricocheting down the halls and startling the citizens). She wonders at the nature of the explosion, at the component parts. Azerite must be involved somewhere. The ore chunk does not get destroyed. Instead, the explosion, by some magic or another, causes the ore to drift to the floor like so many puffs of a dandelion, rather than the pounds and pounds of dense material that it actually is. The device is ugly shrapnel, but it is soon covered delicately by the ore. The best part—this chamber’s floors aren’t scuffed. Not even a little bit. 

Her communicator erupts when she gives the good news. Enna wishes she could have seen. Georgia begins to usher her exhausted Mages back inside Dreamfoil. She turns to assess the aliens, and she regretfully frightens the lone Seioni citizen when she does a double-take. A Follower had located him when the golem had informed the Citizens who the gifts were for, and the Follower pushes him forward.

“You!” she says, and the gold-tattooed lavender male shrinks in fear, catching the ire of the non-Seioni Eti-Ov (“Why fear a Sister of the Queen?” Stygia hears someone say). “Please,” she says, with less excitement, taking a little potted plant out of her golem’s storage chamber. “Go to your elders, bring this. I have brought what they asked.”

Once she has emptied her central chambers of the healthy seeds in their little pots, placing each carefully against the edge of the chamber, and once she sees some of the Seioni arrive at the end of the chamber, who must push past the other Eti-Ov in order to enter (noting the way some of them are slow and stubborn to move, and others are eager and happy for them), she begins to ascend the shaft. The next steps, she is unprepared for. She must assure the safety of her crew before she goes off on ambassadorial ambitions, and besides. The girl could arrive in anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours. 

And Illidan isn’t here, a little voice says, and she, ascending the long shaft, ignores it. And then it comes back. He’s on this moon somewhere, and he could be with Stygia. He’d come, if she asked. So why not? 

Nearly two-thirds up, she wonders what he saw? What could have caused him to become so scarce in the past few hours? Did he see something above them, in the bulk of the pyramid? Did she push too many of his buttons by sending Kor’vas and Jace along? She doesn’t regret that, not in the least. They learned from the experience. 

The pyramid is evacuated of engineers and Mages. Dreamfoil lifts off the ground, once again carrying most of her crew. Phillip Stormwell stays behind—as do a regiment of Paladins, none of whom are as stone-cold as their leader—and the Demon Hunters adjust their patrols to keep closer to the central canal. Stygia takes her gnomish communicator to the glass urns. It has learned much by now. While she translates the cryptic ceramic runes characteristic of grave sites, the Paladins keep an ear to the shaft’s yawning void. They hear the aliens, for sure. If they heard rumors of their existence among the crew, it is by now confirmed. They’re down there. Far away. Chatting. 

“What d’you think they need copper for?” someone asks. 

“What do YOU think? Copper is useful, in’it?” someone answers, sounding more like a rogue than a Paladin. 

Speaker of Snakes, one of the urns reads. What does the word Snake mean to an alien? The forms their top-story estranged neighbors take, or something else? 

“Can’t just be for pipes. Other metals can make pipes.” someone says. 

“Ah, then if not pipes, what could it possibly be? I reckon it’s for bracelets.” someone answers, more sarcasm than draenei. It’s like they forgot Stygia was there, lurking in the back of the chamber, hidden partially by some of the urns. The impropriety makes her bristle, but she knows better than to take unnecessary bites out of morale without good reason. Kor’vas taught her that, once upon a time. 

She who illustrates the soul of her Queen. Variations of this are so common, more than half of the urns must be accompanied by such sentiments. Seioni, Follower of the Doctrine, hell, she wouldn’t be surprised if somehow those beetle-like aliens above them also had an infatuation with this Queen. She wonders vaguely if the Queen is even real. Maybe the Queen is the pyramid itself. She shudders to think what that would mean to Illidan. 

“No need to be rude, I’m just wonderin’. Mighty load of copper.”

“Maybe they’re makin’ a castle.”

“Quiet,” Stormwell says, his neutral voice tinged at the edges by irritation.

She who brought Her teachings unto the Ragged, may she be a vortex upon the vivid violet plane above. The purple gas giant? Is that their version of heaven? It must be wild, to grow up as a species with such a majestic force hovering always in the sky. But then, they haven’t seen the gas giant for thousands of years. Maybe seeing it again would be akin to proof—proof of an afterlife. This inscription’s urn is particularly old. The beads resting upon the ash in the glass urn are diamond-shaped. Two triangular pyramids put together, the same shape as the upper part of this massive building. Whoever this was must have been important. The urn itself is large, and the ash content containing more than twice the volume of the other urns. 

She regrets reading the plates. She looks at the debris of the shattered urns, and their broken or ignored plates, whose associated urns and ash will never again be known. Now she knows what they destroyed—history itself, in a way. 

It has gone quiet. Not just in the pyramid, nor just in the shaft-chamber with its sleeping dead, but down the shaft as well. Perhaps they are quietly carting off their gifts? 

Stormwell makes a noise. He is an old human Paladin, a veteran of a hundred and more threats, and something about his long years of hardship and battle, and of his devotion to that school of magic most revered by humanity, causes him to sense something. It is a hunch. He does not say his Captain’s name, for fear that it is a false alarm. But the note in his voice makes the postures of his Paladins—three besides him, the other two staying aboard Dreamfoil—go rigid. 

It is hope that causes Stygia to glance again down the shaft. Hope that Heurt-Impe, the Eti-Ov Seioni teenager, had finally begun her labored ascent up the shaft, the hope that Stygia could show the girl what her magic does to the world. Dreamfoil is in position, already—aiming from afar, angled such that the magic could not possible leak down into the thriving city beneath the crust, only affecting the canyons and the outer ruins—but something else is happening instead. 

Her communicator bursts with sound, and goes quiet, as though someone had attempted to talk through their gnomish communicator and failed. Kor’vas, who patrols among her kin, suddenly shouts over the line, audible somewhere down the ‘street’ to the left of the barrier looking out. “Ready your glaives. Rollcall.”

The Demon Hunters, thirteen strong, list themselves off. Then; “Kor’vas, Nurilar is gone. The air is hot. Northwest pyramid, toward the middle col—” and at the sound of a terrible impact and a deadened line, half of their number begin to rush at impossible supernatural speed where she had instructed. She watches Jace hop onto a building and dive over it instantly.

Stygia’s nose is centimeters from the Arcane barrier. She sees Stormwell watching her intently in her peripheral. Demon Hunters are wicked warriors. They should be able to handle whatever has found them. In all available lines, Stygia says, “Emergency in the pyramid. Threat unknown. Requesting capable fighters immediately. Keep Dreamfoil protected. Keep dorsal turret ready.” It’s times like these she regrets replacing the ship’s offensive cannon with her Gray magic one. It would still work as an offense, but she’d rather not wipe the brains and magical abilities of her crew members.

“Stygia,” Jace says. She sees the other half of their number make it to the main canal stretching out before the Arcane barrier, and they stop, checking behind them, aimed like poisoned arrows toward the Northwestern part of the pyramid on the other side of the street. “Two injured hunters. Threat is invisible, large, and super hot. We can see shimmers in the air, but no magic signatures are visible.”

“That’s impossible,” she says to herself. “Make yourselves scarce. Strike from alleyways and from within houses, keep it ranged. Paladins,” she says, taking her finger off the communicator. “Your Light—”

Stormwell nods, then looks at the draenei Paladin taller than him by a foot. The two charge out of the barrier, and disappear into the ruined city. The Light answers. It bursts suddenly, spreading from a central point, vibrating and piercing walls with its benevolent warmth. Something roars, and then Stygia hears the characteristic noise of several Demon Hunter eye-beams sizzling the air with rending laser-precise might. The nature of the roar cracks and turns over, going from surprised to angered and hurt. Something on Stygia’s hip vibrates. Her translator is thinking, working. 

She looks at the words, as the invisible beast continues to screech, and the sound of a Paladin’s shield blocking something massive rings out over the ruined buildings and bounces off the ceiling. “Betrayers” ... “Demons” ... “You will not trick me.”

They’re scared, Stygia thinks. The runes at the stairs… she tried to seal a people in. They’re clearly not Eti-Ov, a people who prefer their homey cage. She made a mistake, a grave mistake. Fel courses through her veins. She cannot allow her crew members to die because of a mistake she made, because of assumptions she foolishly believed. The people living upstairs, of course they travel down. Unseen, they could easily travel far from the Pyramid, for any reason, including to hunt, to gather vital items. Sealing them in with runes was a cruel and evil thing to do. Single-minded, thoughtless. The actions of the Demon they believe she is. 

The shadow of Dreamfoil returns, and the sunlight of the late-afternoon is blotted out from the pyramid’s gates. She listens out for the hatch, and is pleased when it doesn’t open. They are going to port to the pyramid’s entrance instead, as far as the wards will allow them—it’s safer that way.

The pyramid resounds with explosions and tumbling rubble. Three housing stacks fall over—two of them explode with the force of some unknown direct impact, and the third is hit by the others. It, whatever it is, is moving toward the Arcane barrier, toward Stygia and the other Paladins, toward the open shaft and the glossy urns. 

The Paladins to either side brace. Stygia takes a step back, unsheathing her warglaives, aware of the rust of her combat abilities in the time between now and Sargeras’ death. 

Something invisible demolishes a housing stack closeby, and suddenly the shape of it is in the middle of the canal. Dust and debris reveal it in stark detail, though most of it remains transparent; A beautiful, massive, long-necked dragon, with six legs and no wings, and an elegant crest stretching crown-like from its skull. It has eight pairs of eyes glittering like those of a ghost. Its tail is a collection of fronds fraying out into four distinct ropes, each as long as the housing stacks are tall. And suddenly, it is gone, the dust falling with an invisible puff of wind, and in its place, streaks of shimmering heat rise and distort the view past where it had been. 

There is a terrible silence. The Demon Hunters take brave looks from their hiding spots. The wiser ones slink into tighter spaces. The tall draenei Paladin comes stomping out from the rubble and dust, raises her crystalline hammer, and the Light reveals the dragon a moment before its body drives beak-first into the only thing separating Stygia from death, drilling in a terrible death roll, and being wholesale rejected by the barrier with a bombastic ripple. 

The dragon is flung back by meters, collects itself with supernatural speed, coiling and rolling, and it assaults the barrier a second time. 

There is a moment where all of its many eyes gaze at Stygia, pressed against a barrier burning and rejecting it. Those eyes… they are tight with hatred and intensity. The eyes of a starving predator being mocked with a crumb of food. She meets its gaze unflinchingly, stoic, and yet, full of sorrow. 

One more assault like that, and the barrier may shatter. 

But the Demon Hunters don’t let it. They take advantage of its rage, and with their wicked hooking weapons, descend upon it. Its hide is tough—magically so, and self-mending—but they spill its alien’s mercurial blood, and send it reeling and bucking. 

The battle lasts maybe two minutes, but, before Stygia’s helpless position, it stretches out like an hour. The Mages have ported in from Dreamfoil, and assault the alien dragon unexpectedly with bullets of frost that dim its white-hot aura and cause it to slow minutely. The draenei Paladin (and eventually Stormwell, limping out of the ruins) keep it visible using the Light. The Demon Hunters keep a mad, impossibly high-paced assault, singularly deciding, as though by collective instinct, to target the thing’s neck. They become gnats. The battle becomes death by a thousand cuts. Clouds of disturbed particles and rubble are pushed through the air, and heat vortexes disperse them. 

Stygia, along with a few others, notice the other aliens, as clouds of dust adhere to their invisible shapes. Perhaps two or three of them stand hunched over on the tops of buildings. They, for whatever reason, do not participate in the battle. They merely watch. As unmoving as statues. Blinking.

An untold number of them could be here, and they would be none the wiser. 

The creature’s invisibility drops, as it fights for its life against foes it can’t catch. Its four tails, budding with vivid rainbow light like Suramar roses, lash and breathe and undulate. The hunters bully it, and it backs itself against the wall near the barrier, snarling with titanic savageness. A foul gasp of golden flame ignites everything flammable in a mighty cone around the dragon, but the hunters are wise to the dangers of flame from their time battling Demons and warlocks, and they evade it expertly.

“Survive me,” the King says, as he snatches Kor’vas from the air, making the speeding wind of a Hunter physical. His head and her body slam against the floor mere meters from Stygia. Before Stygia can breathe, her glaives have pierced the dragon’s skull, through its many eyes. She stands with her hoof on its jaw, her wings spread to their fullest extent, her ears pinned back. Kor’vas rolls away from his mouth. She’s on her feet, she’s bleeding and running.

With the last of his energy, the King exhales a torrent of pyroclastic breath. Everyone runs. Mages teleport. The barrier holds, flickering, and people collect there among the urns and the Paladins. Stygia, digging her glaives deeper into the alien dragon, bares her teeth in a mad snarl. The pain of the heat curls her scales. Her hair singes. The hot metal of her gnomish translator and communicator brands her hips. The mess of vomited, golden fire, and the black smoke accompanying it, lets up at last. 

The Southeastern city ruins are destroyed. Melted like butter, leaving behind a glowing mush which stinks an acrid and terrible stink. 

Stygia yanks her glaives out of the King’s giant skull. Illidan is there, collecting the attention one-by-one of the hiding crew members. They watch him stand and stare across the main thoroughfare, in the middle of the canal, with surprise and confusion and fear plain on their shivering faces. Stygia and Illidan stare at one another. Then, he turns and leaves. 

15  
One Demon Hunter died. Nurilar, who was taken by complete surprise, his body broken in an instant by the invisible dragon’s jaws. There were dozens of injuries. Stormwell’s femur was broken in two places. Kor’vas’s lungs were pierced by the King’s long teeth, and one of her arms may not be salvageable. Vince, having stopped to portal half a dozen people to safety, is suffering third-degree burns across his back and neck. 

Stygia operates by instinct, out of a powerful sense of duty. The injured are helped, the barrier restored, Nurilar’s body is taken away. More should have died. They would have, had the Demon Hunters been anything else—mere warriors, or Paladins. But they are savagely powerful, and fresh from a brutal war, and the King could not have expected such a wielding of chaos magic. 

Someone else—Georgia—exchanges Stygia’s ruined communicator and translator with her own, and she seeks one of the hidden aliens. She flaps in a mad and sudden rush, landing on a rooftop balcony where she had seen one watching the fight.

“Please. I did not want to hurt him. We did not want to hurt him. Speak to me.”

But they do not show themselves. They see her horns, and the curve of her bat-like wings. They see her silver-blooded claws and her pointed teeth. They watched the way she plunged blades into their King. Whatever their opinion, they all but disappear. 

She is relieved that Juli understands the plans. The little gnome on her spidery chair will do well. That teenager will ascend soon, unless the raucousness of the ruined city had traveled too well down the shaft, and Juli will do well, showing off gray magic’s capabilities. Stygia bites her lip hard, drawing glowing Fel-blood that drips slowly down her scuffed chin. “Pretend to be me. The being behind the golem. If it makes it easier.” Her crew watches her with bitterness. We move forward, despite the loss of Nurilar? Despite the grievous injuries, the potential danger? They understand what they signed up for, but their ire for their cold Captain grows. The Paladins are sent out, casting Light, and the aliens have departed, and the Hunters keep just out of sight of the main canal, but close enough to intercept anything. They have left—ascended their stairs, again, the death of their King, proof of some hidden question they were drawing each other’s blood over. 

Juli does not know what to say. Kor’vas would, if she wasn’t losing blood in Dreamfoil’s infirmary. Juli watches her Captain leave the Pyramid, turn away from the hovering Dreamfoil, and begin to fly. Juli feels, fleetingly, that Stygia will never return, but she dismisses the thought as frivolous. Everyone has hiccups, and they knew this wouldn’t always be a walk in the park. She’ll be back. Juli turns to the task of keeping the thoroughfare safe for the alien. She could come any moment, now.

Flying is no easy feat for a winged hunter. It is by the power of Fel coursing like super powered fuel through their veins which allows powered flight. Their wings are otherwise unfit—a little too small, with not a big enough breastbone to anchor them as they push air down—and so she would sweat, if her scales did such a thing. Instead, she spirits on a sharp ascent up the pyramid’s side through the use of Fel magic, flinging itself out of her body, a comet’s tail trailing behind her, until she finds the pyramid’s very tip. 

It looks perfectly sharp from a distance, but she can stand with her flat Demon’s hooves on the tip. There’s a sealed hatch here, and an alien antenna. She realizes her hands are absolutely dripping with blood. It is metallic. Like mercury. She isn’t certain that it’s actually blood, and wonders, absurdly, if mercury poisoning could take out a Demon Hunter.

Rivulets of the alien dragon-king’s beautiful blood thread down the three sides of the pyramid. She hopes they reach the soil. 

We should have waited. I should have pushed it back. The moment we discovered new aliens, I should have pushed it back. She despairs, there. The Imperialism of Azeroth, the casual disregard for the needs of others which so many different peoples have been guilty of, she cannot be. This is absurd. She was thinking like a tactician, a Demon Hunter in a fight for her planet, aggressively pushing objectives against an enemy. She cannot think that way forever. The expedition will fall apart if she does. 

She—blast it. She has to think like a scholar—a Mage. She asks carefulness of her Demon Hunters and does not practice it. She closes a clawed and bloodied and burnt fist and beats the perfect side of the pyramid. It yields not a centimeter to her blow. Her wings fold over her crouched form like wilting petals.

I don’t deserve a second chance.

Sacrifice is there, suddenly, in her peripheral. It hovers, pointing its nose at Stygia. It orbits her at a snail’s pace like a tidally-locked moon. She finally looks at it. The feeling is familiar, the feeling of staring down her death, but this one has no eyes at all. It turns, opening its side like an unfurling leaf. She stares for moments, then finally, she leaps aboard. 

They are close. Sacrifice is a small craft, made by the magical inputs of multiple different Titans for the endeavors of one person. Such wise beings made the starship to be inherited, Stygia thinks, usable by any alien in the galaxy, should someone else have to adopt the mantle of Taskmaster. Though they are close—Illidan, looking out of Sacrifice’s view and deliberately away from Stygia, and Stygia at the opposite end of the craft a mere three meters away. 

It doesn’t feel close. It feels like the Well of Eternity is between them. 

Silence. He does not turn to look at her. Instead, as though listening to his thoughts, Sacrifice begins to move. The craft is solid, and there isn’t the slightest feeling of motion, but the viewport doesn’t lie. They enter a cloud. The indigo light of Weaver turns muggy. 

“Is it time?” Stygia asks. Illidan’s wings twitch. “I joked, when you first arrived, that I was your Task. There was truth. Maybe you felt that. It is dangerous, and I cannot make mistakes. But here we are.”

More silence. The cloud opens. The craft’s perfect faux-window shows them, in beautiful detail not lost on their altered sight, what clouds can do in even a relatively thin atmosphere. Stygia hugs her body, the singed smokey scales brushing uncomfortably against each other. She swallows. Medical treatment doesn’t matter anymore. Her crew has a few more charges before the cores run out of their individual formulae. Then they’ll have to return to Azeroth, having failed. 

“Wasted Fel corruption fades, with enough time away from the things which corrupt it. Not totally, and the nature of that fade only exists in hypothesis. We know it crumbles away. Like mountains becoming desert sands. Inert in this new, scattered form. The corruption lets go.” Her back meets the cold metal of the craft, the meat of her Demon’s wings pressed against it. She slides to a sitting position. “The planets are ruined, forever, without intervention by Gray Magic, but without it, they could wither and rot. Eventually. We think.”

“You think,” Illidan says, still not looking at her. His voice is unreadable. 

Another moment passes. Her communicator tries to get ahold of her, but she promptly switches it off. Kor’vas is stable. That’s good. Voday is a good Healer.

“I’m a Hunter. Not a scholar,” she says. 

His wings twitch again. 

“Regardless. Before the end, I can tell you what to look out for. Should anyone discover it. It will be rare—the idea came to me in a salt flat, can you imagine that? A salt flat and an asphalt lake—but possible.” 

Illidan closes his eyes (she see’s the green of them dim to a close in his almost invisible reflection in the projected window) and takes a long, slow breath. Stygia simultaneously knows exactly what he’s thinking, yet doesn’t have a single clue. 

“That was foolish of you,” he says.

“Yes.”

“You were not ready. You did not know enough. And Bloodthorn should have died as a consequence, same as the alien that dared cross the path of your crew.”

“Yes,” she says, louder this time. “I should have been patient. I… was not.”

“You are patient,” he says, quietly. “But you have... instincts.”

“They were useful once, instincts,” she says. “Where were you?” 

“...I should have been there.” 

The craft has started to descend, though by the magic of altered gravity, their bodies and senses cannot tell. The alien jungle biome stretches out, far and wide. The plants here are more blue than green, with splashes of dancing orange. Many of the trees have taken on a parashroom-like appearance. Mist emerges from the unseen underbrush. It is dark beneath the canopy. The craft allows the sounds of life to infiltrate, and Stygia wonders if that is Illidan’s desire, or permanent design. Cawing, howling, and the chorus of a billion alien crickets make her think, yet again, of Zandalar, or of Un’goro Crater. 

It is a nice place to die. Half of her doesn’t believe it, isn’t ready to go. We could have done so much. And I could have… she gazes at the broad musculature of his shoulders, at his beastly hands.

“Wow,” she manages. The ship slows to a crawl. Stygia stands and, fully expecting to meet a sudden death at the hands of his Fel-infused warglaives, begins to walk closer to the viewport Illidan stands before, dripping beautiful droplets of metallic blood from her tired claws as she goes. She does not notice the changes happening to her tattoos, does not realize the pain of the burns does not answer for the rest of the strange pain wracking her body. 

Her red tattoos are changing color.

His ears perk to hear her footsteps, and still he does not turn to face her. She is a meter away when she is stopped by his voice; “They didn’t give me your letters.” Silence meets the sentence he’s refused to speak for decades. Her heart speeds up almost imperceptibly. He suspects his does, too. This is nothing like battle, but his body is responding as though it is. Angered at his own fear, he turns his head to look at her over the curve of his wing. “I found them, later. I read them thousands of years after you intended.”

“They gave you nothing?” 

“Nothing.” 

Instead of the anger or neutrality he expects, her face screws up with pain. He notices the state of her arms for the first time. They are badly burned. And there are holes in her shirt at the waist, through which brutally burned reddish scales send empathetic shivers down his spine. She is visibly aching. And her tattoos… they were red, before. Weren’t they?

Stupid. So stupid of her, to risk herself like that. At such a rate, she’ll be taken—corrupted—in less than a century of work. Burning out with the brief beauty of a falling star.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “For rambling in them, sure. I’m sure I embarrassed myself. I am… sorry for what they did to you.” 

It is a rare sentiment, and not one he has a response for. He turns, finally, the arc of his wings as his body rotates swishing like a cape. A rare sentiment, and one that almost always comes from her. It should be meaningless. His chest swells. “They do not understand. They never will. It is a waste of thought.” She is glittering. 

“It is... for the best. That inhabitants of a Worldsoul behave such a way. It is for the best, too, that individuals like you can act in ways they cannot. These opposing forces will always exist. The people, full of hope and love, and the warriors and martyrs willing to give everything.” Stygia steps closer. 

She has put into words thoughts he has long given up trying to articulate. He tenses, unused to the vulnerability. He wants to turn and look out of the window. He feels childish, and refuses the impulse. 

Instead, he takes one step closer, his wings flaring out. “Your actions disappointed me today, Stygia.” Her tattoos are silver. The blood on her hands is all gone, now. What kind of magic…?

“I am sure to disappoint you again,” she says, as soft as her corrupted vocal chords allow. “When my name is on your list one day—”

“I will have to—” he cuts himself off. He’s breathing hard. She has stopped, two feet away. Though she is tall and strong, he is still two inches taller, his unwieldy horns swooping down to her level before curving back up. He looks down at her, his nostrils flaring and unflaring, both of his fists clenched. Her lip is bleeding he sees. He wants to reach out and wipe her green blood away, the way his brother picked a stray leaf off of Tyrande’s shoulder ten thousand years ago. What’s stopping me? 

“You will,” she says, barely above a whisper. She drinks in his hesitation. It is almost enough. Almost. 

But Tyrande, wonderful, powerful, beloved Tyrande, obscures her vision. The beautiful dreamfoil in Ravencrest’s gardens, cultivated despite all odds, as she waits for the man she knows will not meet her, springs into her mind. The coldness of Illidan as an instructor, as the leader of the Illidari Demon Hunters, the coldness of a stranger that he may as well have been.

She needs more. More than the hesitation wracking his body, the resistance he’s expressing to the end of her life.

She almost turns away. Until, with stiff tenderness brand-new to the body of Illidan, he reaches out with a claw, and wipes the blood off of her chin. Her wings drop visibly in a great release of tension. He thinks the action... cute.

“I promise to push that day as far away as possible. I promise you I will be more careful than what you saw, today. To act with more patience. To delegate.”

He looks at her. Openly this time, tracing the scaled contours of her face with his eyes, and she watches him. 

Carefully—with similar overcompensating carefulness to that of drawing, with the bulky hands of a Demon—she reaches up to his hand on her chin, and holds it. Their flesh has some warmth, though it is dimmer than the flesh of the uncorrupted. She holds his huge claws in hers. To her sternum. Her heartbeat is slowing, and his follows suit. She notices distantly that the metallic blood had disappeared from her arms, but it doesn’t seem important anymore.

“It doesn’t have to be so,” he says. His voice is kind. “It needn’t be death one way, or death another.”

Her ears perk forward. “We have centuries to plan. Maybe there is a third route.”

“A middle path.”

Simultaneously, they look out the window, Illidan bringing his wing in and out of the way. 

Planet Weaver does have a perfectly good bunker…

16  
A thick black totem stands behind her. It is a strange thing, a magic-sponge, and through a Demon Hunter’s eyes, appears to distort the magic fields around it the way a massive body bends light. It is like a cousin to the three pentagonal towers that had hidden the land of the pyramid and the bunker beneath it, but the nature of it is unclear.

His glaives rest upon the heavily warded chest to one side of her desk. He sets the metallic translator down on another report Juli had recently printed, a strange device to see in his great claws. Now there are two of them. He sits (actually sits) in a chair across from her, lowering himself to eye-level, and relaxing with an ease Stygia hadn’t seen in him before (perhaps because her door is uncharacteristically locked). She leans forward, resting her chin in her hands. He returns her smile. 

“Ready to fall asleep?” she asks.

“If they mention the Queen, I’ll be awake for another hundred years.”

She reaches out a claw to her own translator, casting a shadow over the brief report Juli had produced on the nature of her alien-blooded tattoo transformation, and presses a button. 

The recording plays. gnomes are geniuses. Despite the heavy background thrum of wards and an insane amount of Arcane energy radiating within and near the City, the recording is clear, loud, the voices and their translations unmistakable. 

The elder Seioni cultural leader Kanr-Aern speaks. 

“It was the Queen (Stygia winks at Illidan) who saved us all. Weaver was a wretched place, where Eti-Ov and Eti-Manxi alike suffered from their Kings and Queens, suffered from infiltration and deceit, and a mana addiction that withered all but an extremely lucky few. And it was the case that the cliff beasts, may their cursed name be forever forgotten, had unified, while our kingdoms suffered, and those foul beings could have, given even another decade, taken over all of Y-Doem, from the southern wastelands to the northern mountain wood. We remember these histories, because we know no one else will. The Followers love the Queen without reason, as though she is inseparable to the very idea of infatuation and charm. We remember why we love her. (Raek-Wa makes an affirmative grunting noise, and a young person laughs). 

“She lead the people, and became a killer of Kings and Queens with her terrifying might gifted from the afterlife itself, a purple power raining from on high, and she loved the only kind King of the Eastern Sea, and they were together in greatness. She separated the Eti-Ov and the Eti-Manxi from their mana dependence. To be near mana, to use it, became, to us, as a great sacrifice, rather than an entitlement. Only those willing to give themselves up for noble causes were allowed to learn it.

“Time turned on. The cliff beasts were defeated and made dumb and mad, and they turned their blades back upon one another once again. We forgot, as mortals do, how bad things could get. The Knights of Mana went from being a sacred honor of humble warriors able to be called upon by anyone in need of their protection and strength, to being a joke of a title. Yet, as the casual use of magic became more commonplace, the nobility associated with magic never departed. The Queen’s Garden was sought after by all. This CIty was built around it, filled by migrants hoping to catch even a single glimpse of Her, to get their wishes granted by Her in the Pool of Lu-Urit. The Queen City, as this is actually named, was never meant to be a cage and a bunker. 

“Until a Seioni prophet and a Draxfit Dreamer came with news of the upcoming end of the world. The Gardeners had known it was coming for centuries, and they prepared, and they tucked their people away, and they secured citizens in this bunker of a city, and then they fell asleep.”

Stygia’s voice pipes up, filtered through the golem. “We saw pods lining the far wall, and they were filled with sleeping people.”

Raek-Wa makes another noise. The aliens stir. Some of them whisper. Kanr-Aern trills, and continues. “They were meant to be awakened a thousand years ago. The Trials should have ended by now,, as was promised, and this Moon departed.”

“Departed?” Stygia asks. 

“They promised to take us to Neel, our sister moon, chosen Plane of Lu-Urit and the Queen, where a new Garden fit for all Eti-Ov could be grown. But, stranger, if what little Huert-Impe says about your magic is true, (Huert-Impe’s voice pipes up, her friend encouraging her this time: “It was! We saw! They cleaned it up like it was NOTHING!”) then perhaps the teachings… Perhaps the chosen Garden, Neel, is what Weaver is becoming. Neel is on her way. (The voices in the room sound happy, excited). Our Trials are nearly over. Those swirling in the Afterlife, in Lu-Urit, have opened the way for those of us still in the Queen City. 

“As I was saying… the end of the world came, as Ghi the Prophet and his love and guardian, Shonwaut the Dreamer, predicted. And old prejudices arose, and preparations were made the world over, and people… the Eti-Manx worst of all… were turned away from bunkers and safehouses. The Seioni made it here because the Followers of the Doctrine believe us to be useful fools, a people loved by their Queen in the stories they do bother to tell, a people with mysterious connections to the timeways. (Someone sniffs, and Huert-Impe laughs with her friend) The Draxfit were allowed in because of their innate connection to the moon, the way they can sense its well-being. But the Eti-Manx…”

“The Eti-Manx, they’re shorter than Eti-Ov, darker? Shapeshifters without wings?”

“Shapeshifters? No, no. They were smaller. Beings of darkness. Never trusted, because the Gardeners could not control them, could not contain them. They can slip through a crack in a door, the stories say. Our stories say they were lied to and abandoned.”

“They’re alive,” Stygia says. Illidan can hear the remorse in her voice, but the aliens do not pick it up. The statement causes excitement and noise. Somebody had split their tail into its three legs and is skittering on the hard floor. 

Raek-Wa’s voice: “It cannot be so. Millennia have passed. They survive? Where? How?”

“The pyramid above your City is large, and we thought it abandoned, but they have scraped by. They are difficult to communicate with, mistrusting as anyone would be, and there have been misunderstandings, but they are alive. Yes; they shapeshift. All of them, near as we can gather. Into different animals.”

Kanr-Aern makes a noise of surprise. It sounds like a happy noise. “This is good news, you give us. We always understood the Eti-Manx as a tragedy, a tale of the extent of blind hate. But their tale is changing. They are survival incarnate, as they have always been. Yes, yes. The Gardeners hated them, for the way they melded with the Spirit world so fluidly, became like air and shadow. And they made it anyway. The prophesy came true, and the Dreamers, the Draxfit, and the instruments of the Gardeners showed us what was becoming of Weaver. A great green streak tore through the sky, and when it left, there was only ruin and death and violence.”

“You have much animosity toward the Gardeners.”

“We have animosity toward the waking ones. These Knights of Mana do not wield magic weapons for the protection of their peoples. They wield magic chains, and they hold up a spyglass to record the exact bruise patterns these chains produce. The ones who sleep, who none have seen in centuries, we remember some of their names, and we remember how beloved they are to the Queen.”

“I have a difficult question to ask,” Stygia starts. Illidan leans forward in his seat. “If we were to exorcise the current Gardeners…” she hesitates, apparently trying to read the room. “...to extinguish the control the Garden has over its people, and to forcefully awaken the sleeping Gardeners, the sleeping Knights of Mana, in hopes of ushering in a new era… would we have your approval?”

There is a long pause. “You will heal Weaver. All of Weaver. The land will welcome us again. We will leave this place.” Raek-Wa says something quietly, perhaps whispering to the wise leader of the Seioni. She draws in a long sigh. “Outsider—Stygia. You have given us what we asked for, and your healing is true and Lu-Urit-divine, as though the violet plane made you herself. There is a question burning in our hearts, a question we have had for thousands of years. I do not want to speak the words. (A hush rolls over the room. The tone changes. Illidan realizes he is gripping marks into the desk.) She is dead, isn’t she? Do you know? We have long suspected… the stories of her love and vivid smile do not line up with her long absence, a silence that has stretched its arms into our hearts.”

There is another pause. The current Stygia sitting across from Illidan sighs hard. “She has been dead for a long time. We suspect they keep her body animated, but it is a lie. I am deeply sorry. I know I cannot understand this grief. Azeroth—my world—has its beloved leaders, but none who span so many different people as your Queen.” 

The aliens make sorrowful noises, a sound like a cricket singing from the bottom of the sea. “We will not devote people to your effort, but we will help you. We will help you clean the Garden. Perhaps we can refill it with those who are worthy. People have gone missing. It is a rare occasion. I would like to know where they went—what use they had—and I would, especially, enjoy the Followers of the Doctrine being proven wrong. Keep your plans away from them. They will fight you.”

Stygia, current Stygia, points behind her at the huge intimidating totem. “They gave me this. It’s the only one they have.”

“Is it… a ward warder?” 

“Near as I can tell, yes. It would make their automatic Arcane weapons aim off by a considerable degree—according to what me and Juli could surmise. They think it a Magic Eater. We’ll see what it does. But that’s not all.” She flips off the translator. “The Draxfit gave me something else.” 

“A pillow?” he mutters, leaning back in his chair. 

“These.” She puts five different wooden totems on her desk. They’re filthy with soil, for some reason, but otherwise would make for beautiful collector’s items, for how intricate and careful the etching of the fur and scales and other details is. “These can, apparently, assist in illusionary transformations despite the City’s quadrillion wards against such methods of infiltration. I called upon one, in the golem while I was walking through the City, just to see, and I thought it didn’t work, until Georgia told me topside that my sleeping body had become an alien... dog-thing, for a little while.”

Illidan’s eyebrows raise. It worked through the City’s warded walls, to target her real body? That’s how strong they are?

“Juli is working on modifying them. Animal forms wouldn’t do for your purposes. Elf ones might.”

“My ticket in,” he says. 

Silence passes. Dark silence. With the black totem, an elvish form, and the portal’s keystone, he could get into the Garden just fine. But there’s no telling what those Gardeners remember (or ever even knew) of combat. And still—it could be an outright massacre, which neither of them could ever be proud of. She does not push accompaniment on him, other than golems, and he does not seek it. Human Paladins, or the additional complexity of other illusionary Demon Hunters, would make his task more difficult. Besides. He could sneak in, regardless of what sensors they have. When it comes down to an alien’s searching eyes, and his cloak of shadows, his blade will always be quicker than their spells. Hopefully. The Titan-crafted necklace ticks on his sternum. It can protect him for a long time, no matter what manner of magic they throw at him. 

He puts a claw on the report beneath her elbow, and gives her a questioning look. Those tattoos were his own invention, more or less. It’s strange to see the change, the way her red ones have become rivers of gleaming mercury. Her burn marks have disappeared as well. Every time the sun catches her, she throws off reflected bits of light, now. It is oddly endearing.

“Ah. We’re not sure. The King had healing capabilities. Juli compared properties of his body to that of Alextrasza’s flight. I instructed the other Hunters not to go near the body, just in case, but it seems the dead King has been taken away in the night. Two other hunters have this… issue, when they spilled too much blood on their bodies from the fight. Kor’vas included. Her arm hasn’t regrown or anything, but it has taken quickly to that gnomish prosthetic, and it may have saved her life, and Feradon—is… social, now, I am told.” 

He gives her a look that clearly says “That’s not good enough.” He stands and walks around the desk, and he leans over her, crouched on a knee, to run a cursory claw along the metallic tattoo on her right bicep. It’s different, now. Reinforced, ideally. Worst-case scenario… some heretofore unseen manner of corruption.

She says, quietly, “I feel better. The Fel voices are dimmer than they used to be. Still there, but a little more quiet.” She glances at her bed, which had been used perhaps four times in the year+ of occupying Dreamfoil. Illidan looks past her shoulder and wing to see it. The covers are messy. He looks at her for a moment before standing and returning to his seat. 

“I have reason to think you’re safe,” he says. 

“I would like to hear your side of things. What happened, up there?” She holds the place on her upper arm that he had examined with fondness. 

“I did not hide what I am to them,” he begins. “I came with questions, and eventually, they began to answer.” 

He reaches out and clicks something on his own translator, sitting on the desk. 

Stygia has never seen the upper pyramid, and perhaps she never should. Based on what Kor’vas had said, she imagines it is a dark place, filled with brambles and thick vines, and columns cracked through with weeds. She hears nothing in the recording, at first. Then, his weapons clatter onto a surface, and he takes deliberately loud steps. 

“Are you afraid of me? I am unarmed. I have no tricks. But you are wise to hide. Demons are powerful, terrible beings. I would know. I have slaughtered thousands of them. Put their own tricks to use against them. I ate their soul and forced it to work for me. Of course you flee. But are you afraid to listen? To even speak?” Stygia smiles, and Illidan eyes her questioningly. What an Illidan way to perform an ambassador.

His voice is loud, clear. It echoes less than she expects. It must be muffled by foliage. 

“You watched us slay the one who attacked us. We watched you cut down your own. We fear each other. But it needn’t be so. Today, you saw my friend’s magic. She healed the wicked canyons in front of the ruined city. It’s now a forested gully, where before it was a perilous trap filled with starving beasts. Is this not true? Or are you blind, as well as fearful?”

“You are blind to us,” someone says. It sounds like someone else tries to quiet them. 

Then someone else says, hissing, “Killer of the Evil Mother and her thousand children. (Illidan smirks at Stygia.) We saw. Our gatherers ran, as the magic came. And when they returned, it had become green. Why?”

“We heal the world for you, and for the ones beneath your feet,” Illidan says, lying about his own motivations easily. “Your world is sick. We heal it. Do you not have hardships? Do you not lack resources, drinkable water? It will get easier, soon. If there are any other enemies you have, like the ‘Evil Mother’, we will vanquish them.”

Silence comes again. There’s whispering. Illidan braces himself with paced-out feet. Current Illidan, playing with a little folded paper animal that Vince had given Stygia (dwarfed ridiculously by his hands), says, “Here, their leader shows himself. No one else does. He was covered in scars, head to toe.”

The voice of the leader—younger sounding than Stygia had anticipated—sounds clear over the line despite the distance between them. “You killed our mad King.” 

“Yes.” 

“...Thank you.”

Stygia looks up at him, her head tilted. He smirks.

“You’re welcome,” recorded Illidan says. 

“He had been dead to us for thousands of years… My grandparents, and their grandparents knew this to be true. Our ancestors have forgotten what it means to have a King unclouded by madness and hibernation. So it is true, that you are here to help.”

Whispered voices all around the room lash about. Clearly, not everyone agrees. 

“Yes.” 

Another silence. They start to walk. The whispers do not stop, but the aliens begin to walk openly, apparent by the sounds they make when they ambulate, where before they were as quiet as ghosts. 

“He’s taking me to the upper story. The tip of the pyramid. It’s… clear where the signatures of corruption had come from,” Illidan says, stretching out the folded bird’s wings. 

“We are not in danger any longer, then?” 

“Correct. Upstairs… They hold a pair of Wild Gods. Big, gnarly creatures. Noble looking. One of them is corrupted. The other isn’t. They’re locked together, permanently assuring that the other can never awaken. They might be the reason the Dreamers can get away with what they do.” Illidan reaches over and switches off his recording. “They want you to heal him. His sister could finally awaken, if her brother is wiped and re-raised.” 

“Why not?” she muses, considering. She writes something down for later. He watches her arm move, observes the shining metal color of the re-colored tattoos. “If you think it’s safe for me to go up there…”

“The King’s cloud of madness cleared upon death,” Illidan states. “His blood… I believe its effects must be a dying gift. I believe this, because... every alien, when they revealed themselves, was covered in it. Their finger tips, their eyes and their crests, and in straight lines spanning each of their four arms. The King, in death, gave them the same boon he gave you.”

“Protection,” Stygia suggests, tracing her tattoos with a claw. 

“But be wary. We don’t know for sure.” He stands, and turns to leave. He is set on something, though she’s not sure what.

“Goodbye,” she says. Something in her voice makes him turn to look at her. 

Dreamfoil is emptier today, much more quiet. Stygia had requested the creation of more golem pairing disks, and as Georgia acquiesced, the Captain had sent the word out that she was looking for volunteer alien-ambassadors. Many volunteered. She had to dissuade a Demon Hunter (the newly talkative Feradon, with his silvered tattoos), whose talents were far more useful elsewhere, and whose appearance, though not relevant for this particular ambassadorial endeavor, would be too much of a negative for the future. 

They are out in the underground city now. Two groups of three, and many stragglers hoping to make maps, or gather data, or listen to the woes of the aliens. One golem is walking the upper Pyramid. The aliens there, the small vibrant beetle-like Eti-Manx, are wary of that lone ambassador, and are far more likely to slip between realms rather than communicate with them. But the golem finds passage, mapping the City they called the Thorn Chambers. The shaft chamber’s burial urns find neighbors in the sleeping, hunched-over bodies of the ambassadors, its barrier thrumming stronger than ever.

She expects their reports to be messy at first, as beginners of this skillset. Time will tell. 

The infirmary used to be a torture room. All signs of its past have been removed. The only wicked thing is the architecture of the Legion-crafted chamber, which hooks and curves in dark layers, evoking plagued imagery. The lights are warm and comforting these days. The beds, soft. The instruments, those of healing rather than those of pain. Stygia heard the only problem with the room is one remaining tortured soul who refuses to leave. She’s a quiet ghost, and venomous, but she seems to be assuaged by calm and quiet voices and—as Stygia passes through a pungent cloud of smoke—incense and candles. 

She passes by Phillip Stormwell. He looks half-awake, his armor piled at the feet of his bed, his leg thickly suspended by a cast. He acknowledges her with a hazy nod. Whatever herbs they have him on must be powerful. Noellene has fallen asleep in a chair. She had been reading to him.

“Captain,” Kor’vas says, perching herself up on her hospital bed. She’s bathed in a pool of Weaver’s noon, indigo light from a projected window, and her chest is covered in gauze. Voday, the Healer, nods at Stygia from a ridiculously huge and cushioned armchair in the corner, looking up from his book, before Stygia disappears behind Kor’vas’s partition. 

“What do you think?” she asks, pointing at Kor’vas’s remaining arm. Her black tattoos had gone metallic, just like Stygia’s. 

“It’s pretty, I think,” Kor’vas says. “Makes me feel even more like a mechagnome, though.”

Stygia examines Kor’vas’s robot arm. She wiggles her new fingers. 

“May I…?”

Kor’vas nods, and Stygia feels the strange device. She bends her arm at the elbow, observing the elbow’s mechanism closely. The magic of it is complex. Arcane, as most constructs of this nature, but with clever material-use that takes advantage of elemental earth and air magic properties. It’s not the beacon of magic she had expected, but it is obvious even at a glance. She bends Kor’vas’s fingers. They make almost no sound at all.

“I can feel, you know…” she says. Stygia inhales sharply, and releases her arm, resisting the urge to place it back down like an expensive instrument, since Kor’vas has full control over it. Kor’vas laughs.

“Amazing,” Stygia says. 

“No, no. What’s amazing is sleep. Do you remember sleep? I do, now. I’ve been sleeping for hours, Captain.” 

“You look ready to leave already,” Stygia admits. Her bed is well-used, not the slab of non-blanketed stone hunters are so used to. Her horns, Stygia thinks, are good for sleep. They’re short and practical. Stygia’s are vertical, thick trunks reaching up and curving, and her wings make finding a comfortable sleeping position slightly more annoying. These are not issues she’d ever worried about, before. She considers sawing her horns down, but she knows she would miss them. 

Stygia had slept last night, for a few hours, and she dreamed of an endless salt flat. The same dream she had seen in the months leading up to her Demon Hunter transformation. She can’t wait to do it again. 

“Maybe in a day or two. That lizard took a lot out of me,” Kor’vas says.

“Yes,” Stygia says. She swallows. “I came to apologize to you, Kor’vas.”

The hunter’s eyes narrow.

“Had I been more careful,” the Captain continues. “Nurilar would still be alive, and you would have your arm. We should have waited. I should have called it, as soon as we saw signs of distress. We tried to trap them.” Stygia shakes her head. “It was foolish. I am sorry.”

“It was stupid,” Kor’vas says nonchalantly. “It felt wrong, to me.”

“I never… I never wanted you to feel like you couldn’t tell me when I’m being foolish. We will be warping back to Azeroth to re-up on supplies in twelve days. When we swing by Dalaran, I’m certain they would port you anywhere you’d want to go. I will keep my promise. Eight thousand gold, if you’d like to start somewhere else.”

“That’s even more stupid,” Kor’vas says. Stygia’s look of sorrow is tinged by incredulity at the edges, and Kor’vas laughs again. “I know what I signed up for. Everyone does, but me especially.” Her face flashes with pain as she pushes herself up to a sitting position. “It’s a good cause to die for. This has all been, but your magic is no different. Nurilar died a good death.” 

Her voice shakes as she says his name. 

“A needless death—”

“We had to learn somehow. We don’t have all the right answers. You and your crew, Captain, will only make fewer mistakes as time goes on.”

She winks away the ghost of a tear—Stygia’s not sure she can cry anymore, but her body—the elf parts, at least—is trying. Kor’vas is, leaky Fel tears traveling down silent streams on her cheeks, her face stoic, her brow furrowed. She may not have cried from anything other than pain in decades. Kor’vas had seen much death, had lost countless dependable comrades on the field of battle. But something about this expedition has softened her. Perhaps it is the hope that things could be different, one day. The hope that no one would have to lose sisters and brothers to Demons ever again. 

Nurilar could have seen it start to change. The others, out on the field of battle against the Legion, accepted death the moment they drew their glaives. Nurilar was just… unlucky. 

The ghost moans suddenly, and swishes by the Infirmary’s partitions. They hear the Healer get out of his squeaky armchair, and watch him shuffle slowly by, holding up a plate of cookies as though he were trying to calm down a rambunctious child instead of something incorporeal, a calm smile on his face.

Stygia reaches out to hold both of Kor’vas’s arms. She holds her firmly, squeezing the hard and muscular flesh of one, gripping the glinting metal of the other. “This won’t happen again, Kor’vas. I promise. I won’t fail my crew this way again. And I will learn from every mistake I make.” 

“I trust you.” Kor’vas says gently, putting her robotic hand upon one of Stygia’s, as though she had already forgotten it wasn’t her old one. 

Stygia will never forget.

17  
The Captain stands on top of her ship at the very bow, as close to the edge as possible. Below, the modified Gray Magic cannon, with its six enormous rods and central focusing gyroscope, sits, primed and ready. She dusts a material—one part salt, the other parts a mystery—onto her outstretched claws, then bends down to pick up the staff she’s had for centuries. It has gone underutilized. The thing will never again be coaxed to its full potential, at least not by her hands. But its job now is important. 

She sees the invisible point in space that represents one of the ship’s Arcane eyeglasses. She inhales, closing her eyes, stretches her arms out, staff in hand, and when she gives the slightest nods to the observing and invisible eye, it begins.

The bow of the ship erupts with color. The base of Stygia’s staff slams down on the ship’s body. With its head, the rainbow converges toward her, and with her salted hand, she forces it into a neat little lattice. She’s blind, in a moment. The magic is too much for her unbound Demon Hunter’s eyes to focus on. And the magic had only flashed its cores open and closed for less than a second.

The concentration of every major field of magic is like a flock of song notes honing in on a tiny point in space, and Stygia, casting and vibrating, is like the conductor of an orchestra.

Beneath her feet, in the ship’s laboratory, Illidan sits on some absent Mage’s desk with his arms crossed. He hasn’t taken his eyes off of Juli Stormkettle for a second. It has been an hour. 

An Eti-Manx is aboard the ship, too. She is frightened, visibly resisting the urge to slip between dimensions and sneak off the ship. But she is wingless, unlike the females of the Eti-Ov—her second pair of arms are, instead, unusually long and wickedly barbed. Juli is more pleasant to be near than Illidan, to the Eti-Manx. She has a normal number of legs (the elderly gnome’s true feet obscured by her three-legged mobility chair), and is a normal size (without the chair, she’d be far smaller than the alien, but with it, they are of similar volume). 

This alien has been covered by the mercurial threads of her dead King. The boon is similar, if not identical, to the transformation Stygia had undergone. It’s beautiful to look at, the way it splashes down her hands and becomes thin little rivers, meeting at a lake upon her heart, and discoloring the rims of her four eyes. 

Illidan had stormed into the Thorn Chambers of the upper pyramid and openly demanded the assistance of an Eti-Manx individual. This little one had volunteered, bravely un-shielding herself from the shadows. He knows nothing about her. 

She snatches the blanket from Juli’s hands as soon as it’s clear it is a gift. The thing is wrapped around her body, under her four arms, almost like a dress, before Juli can think to smile. 

“Oh, good. I’m glad you like it. I’m sorry it’s so cold in here,” Juli says, still getting used to the poltergeist that is Illidan mugging her down from the corner of her once-cozy lab. If anyone else had been working in here, they have long since taken their papers elsewhere.

“This material is warm… soft.” the alien (apparently named Kilder) says. She stretches her longer, barbed arm out upon the table again, of her own volition, and Juli puts her hands together and bows her head before looking over it. 

“It’s synthetic, completely artificially made. It wasn’t made using animal hides or animal furs.”

Kilder makes a fizzing noise with her alien mouth. “Like from Paradise.”

Juli smiles wide and shrugs, hapless. She’s too busy to keep up with alien lore. She glances at Illidan, quickly looking away with obvious regret. 

The instruments are sharp and cold, but Juli is careful to an extreme—there are no hands as careful and delicate as a gnome’s. The alien, examined by almost anyone else, would have asked to return by now. 

From his vantage point, past Juli and Kilder, past the lab’s enormous instruments, past its specimen tanks, a huge faux-window pours Weaver’s indigo light into the room. He sees bulbs of multicolor magic spin off and burst into harmless twinkles. His communicator is set to low, and he has been listening to the Captain’s efforts to draw Gray Magic out into a smaller, portable, and extremely temporary form. Without the help of the cores and gyroscope, the process is slow. But it looks beautiful, even from here. 

Vince walks into the room. His burns, thanks to the work of shamans, were swiftly mended with elemental water magic. He is stiff, and his robe is bulky with the wrappings hidden underneath, but he is faring better than Stormwell and Kor’vas. 

He takes one look at Illidan and walks out. 

Illidan’s hand is on his shoulder before he makes it a foot further down the hall, and Vince winces. His hand stays. 

“Mage,” Illidan says. 

Vince Huckden twists out of his hand and fearfully, angrily eyes the huge Demon Hunter. “I’m telling Georgia you’re still harassing Juli.”

“Are you a child?”

“No,” he bristles, winking the sleepiness (and drugged haze) of injury-recovery away. “She—we have important work. This is harmless. Obviously.”

“Alien blood…” Illidan starts, but he stops himself. His teeth shining through his Demon Hunter’s neutral scowl cause Vince’s heart to race. 

“Leave it to the Mages, Hunter. If Juli says it’s benign—It’s a gift, even!” 

“She’s your Captain,” he says. The contempt in his voice causes Vince to step back, shaking his head in an indignant “no”, and turn to leave. 

“Report,” Illidan asks, skulking back into the lab. 

Something in a round alchemical vial pops, with Juli’s careful eye taking note. “Well, sir,” the gnome starts, scribbling something on a piece of paper, trying to ignore the way the three-fingered Eti-Manx is gawking at her four-fingered hand as it works. “The properties are regenerative, to an extent…” she shakes her head quickly. “With the intent of its spirit host gone, the bindings and spellwork of the blood, once erased, would be gone forever. But that also means we can’t know the true nature of the boon without years of study. Still. It has every indication of being a thing of benevolence, similar to any permanent boon given by a Loa or other such deity. Protection is the word. Protection from disease, from curses, physical protection…” 

“What of domination? From a foreign entity.”

“Like a mindbender? No. It’s more basic and physical than that. For example, impact-base magic is less harmful, but most magic would still affect the host the same.”

“Explain, gnome, why the Demon influence is more quiet in her head.”

“I can’t,” she says simply, looking back at the alien’s still dutifully outstretched arm, rather than face another moment of Illidan’s mad stare. “Unless you guys have inner voices you’d like to keep dampened, (Kilder blinks with confusion and says “No?”) the only feasible explanation is that the King’s departing spirit noticed the Demon Hunter’s inner battle, and tried to help. Maybe he felt sorry for mistaking Stygia for a Nathrezim?” Juli sips tea from her canteen, swallows hard, then faces him again. “Their boons differ somewhat from the ones on Stygia, Kor’vas, and Feradon. They were his people, and he knew them, and thus they are stronger, tailored better to their anatomy. Getting a tiny skin sample from this one was like trying to pinch a fleck of steel from a solid plane of it, for example, whereas our Hunter’s skins are merely hardened by a factor of two.” 

Kilder looks up and closes all four eyes. It looks like a gesture of prayer. “He is with His beloved now, and on the eve, he did not forget us.”

Juli regards the alien as one would regard a houseplant singing a soliloquy. 

Illidan reclines, finally looking away from the gnome, who feels tension leave her body. He stares at their strange grell-imp (apparently named Dandelion in some kind of sick joke) specimen in its tank, in a permanent state of hibernation. 

All crew members were hand-picked by Stygia. Juli is a genius—a multi disciplined and wise old gnome, with the right brain for magic theory. If she, who values her Captain as a leader and, perhaps, as a fellow Mage (or at least a scholar), pronounces the alien blood as safe… then it is so. 

“If you are wrong, Mage…” Illidan says. She shivers in her chair, the spiderly legs rattling metallically. Illidan looks at the alien. “Kilder. It’s time to return. Follow me.” 

The second they step foot in the pyramid again, Kilder disappears. Illidan doesn’t bother trying to find her. 

He is still there when Stygia arrives. Noellene, two other Paladins, and Feradon, the third and final Demon Hunter whose tattoos had been silvered by the dead King’s blood, follow closely behind. Two of the Paladins carry magic devices to either side of Stygia. They are the axis of a magical barrier. Illidan nods in approval at the arrangement, but will have words with her later, knowing for certain that there must be a way to transport small amounts of Gray Magic without needing Stygia to be physically involved. 

She holds the thing, a blinding magic, a shivering orb casting off every color known and unknown, cradled by the mysterious salty dust in one clawed hand. In the other, her old magister’s staff is at the ready, held low at her side. They travel at a slow pace. Illidan creeps behind the group. 

Their new leader, the heavily-scarred Eti-Manx named Brink, appears from nothing to escort them through the brambles and vines and twisting trees of their dark forest of a city. Brink is joined by others. They are becoming more brave. Illidan watches them appear with curiosity. It is an ability not unlike the shadowmelding of night elves, but it is not of Elune. Whatever this ability is… if it was a gift, its giver is surely long, long dead. 

“Today, the veil of evil is lifted,” Brink says. 

The highest chamber of the pyramid is much taller than it is wide. A long column of shattered crystals flays out toward the floor, and at the epicenter of this frozen and destroyed gem field, are a pair of Wild Gods. They’re much smaller than Stygia expected, but their bodies are long, and their countenance, wolfish. Both of them are glowing. One of them casts a field of light that bounces off the glittering and destroyed prisms floating around them like a star field. The other, the one wracked by Fel thorns and lime-green scars, casts a darkness that obfuscates all that enters it. They orbit one another, locked in some psychic hibernation. The enormous chamber’s edges are unseen past a jungle of alien plants reaching all the way up to the ceiling. It smells of earth, and of life, and of death, and by the look of the paths leading up to the shattered crystal column, it a place of ritual. 

Illidan regards the crowd. Hundreds—over a thousand Eti-Manx have gathered openly. Some of them are unusually large, their backs covered in a shell that reinforces the beetle-ish look. Over half of them are in different animal forms. The strange birds he had instinctively dismissed as harmless eye the procession with sapient intelligence.

Stygia watches Brink. He moves toward the twin Wild Gods, stopping on a make-shift pedestal, and when he offers his own grayish-gold blood, the Paladins to either side of Stygia wince. Noellene, behind her, giggles quietly at their reactions.

“Death will never be known by the Twins of fear and strength. Pirim, be reborn. She is honored by Him, Noorip. Today you awaken from your infinite struggle. Today you will feel fully our adoration for you. Today, you will be free.”

With her procession in tow, she walks up to the corrupted brother of Noorip, feeling sluggish in the magic field, shoves a chunk of prism out of the way with her wing, and pushes the globe of gray magic directly into Pirim’s chest, the force of her staff keeping its plunge steady and true. 

She pulls back, quickly. Her and Feradon’s instincts are snappier than those of the Paladins, but they all manage to stagger out of the crystal field, as every single shattered chunk of column begins to spin, with the twin gods at the very center. They emerge from mutually-assured stasis slowly, and their movements become quicker, and quicker, and the spinning turns faster, and faster, and the crowds slip into their own shadows to get away, and vines are ripped from the walls and floors. The magic of it is blinding—the Demon Hunters squint to see. There is a loud roar, a hissing sound that rattles them all to their cores. Silence overtakes the terrifying noises. The crystals careen out of their orbits, crashing like meteors around the room, peppering people with pebbles of it, and hitting the ground with loud thunks. People exclaim from pain and fear. The chaos lingers in the aura of the chamber, but at last the crystals all fall, inert. The column above appearing thinner than it had before. Its point, sharper, as chunks had fallen down and been cast away by some unknown force. 

Illidan and Stygia look at each other. He had crouched over her through the barrier of the Paladins, spread his wings out like a shield of his own. He rises, helps her to her feet, before too many people notice. 

The Wild God, a serpent with two arms and mantis-blades folding over her fully articulating claws, whose four-eyed face carries a single horn like that of a narwhal, and whose back prickles with glowing fungus-like fronds, holds her now-uncorrupted infant of a brother in her hands. She winks the eternal sleep out of her eyes, holds her brother close. Brink approaches. She coils and points her horn at him, remembering the Eti-Manx slowly, but when her nose touches his forehead, she places her slumbering and tiny brother into his four careful arms. 

It is a personal moment, a bookend to their endless struggle to survive. Stygia whispers that they should leave—but then, suddenly, with movement like a lightning strike, the Wild God’s horn tip is at Illidan’s chest. A bead of Fel blood drips down. The Eti-Manx exclaim, and Brink, distracted by the mewling God, is slow on the uptake. 

She is the size of a mountain horse, and as long as two crocolisks end-to-end, but she makes up for her small size (for a Wild God and a Loa) with supernatural speed that even Illidan did not see coming. 

Stygia’s clawed hand finds his forearm. He breathes slowly. 

The language she speaks is ancient, and the translator on their hips vibrate with question marks and loading screens. 

Brink dashes over, his partner—a thinner male with a small child at his feet—rushes to help him with the little Wild God. “Noorip!” Brink shouts. “We know what you must think of him, but he is a friend, not an enemy.” 

She spouts more of an ancient language. 

“Please, lower your horn. His body is Demonic, but his mind belongs to him.” 

She doesn’t move. Her four eyes do not move from their stare. Illidan feels Stygia squeeze his arm, then, foolishly, she moves in front of him. For some reason, the Loa’s horn retreats. In an instant, he understands why. The silver blood—both Feradon and Stygia are coated in it, just like the rest of the Eti-Manx, now. Illidan is not. He must have triggered the same endless rage with which Noorip had channeled to keep her brother contained in mutual stasis. The others are safe. He is a blaring target.

“I… You…” the Loa says, in the same tongue used by the Eti-Manx. “Leave. Leave this place. Leave.” 

Brink and his partner look over the outsiders. But before anyone acts, the hair (whatever body hair she has left from the transformation, that is) on the back of Stygia’s neck raises. Something’s wrong. The Paladins seem just as confused and worried as ever, but Feradon looks around frantically. Illidan looks up. His ears perk. The Wild God leaves. She’s looking up, too. She leaps into a shadow—as though jumping into an invisible portal—and appears high, high in the chamber, ascending the central column by spiraling her serpent's body around it. She appears to sniff, to listen out with the flat ears of a lizard, and then, as the roomful of Eti-Manx hide in terror within pockets of shadow, the Loa destroys the very ceiling. 

Chunks fall down—it is a small breach, and she swings her head down quickly to check if anyone’s in their trajectory, but she quickly hurls herself through the opening. 

Stygia and Illidan run to look up through it. Then, slowly, they look at each other. Noorip howls from the pyramid’s roof. The little Wild God infant howls in an inappropriately adorable mirroring. 

The gas giant is... changing. 

18  
It was a lie. The elitist Gardeners at the center of the most protected fortress in the known Universe lied. Of course they had. The Doctrine that they cultivate, the way their little drones automatically cultivate plants, disallows the information the two Demon Hunters had offered to exist simultaneously among their own lies. 

“An elite and powerful society built upon half-written textbooks that haven’t been up to date in thousands of years,” Illidan had called them. 

The only explanation, confirmed by the passed-down histories of the Seioni citizens of the hidden Queen City surrounding the buried Garden, is that those fools had been hiding there long before the Demon threat ever came. 

Given everything she has been told, and all the information her ambassadors have gathered, Stygia has put together a sensible series of events, to explain the current state of Weaver. 

Immortal Knights of Mana had entered the Garden with the information that Weaver would suffer an apocalypse. Already there, the consorts of the Queen, other immortal Knights of Mana, with their own goals and ideas, accepted their estranged kin. The new arrivals came with warnings, and built plans, and prepared the citizens of the Queen City. The old guard—Highborne analogues?—watched them put themselves in stasis with every expectation that nothing would change. Because why would it? They could have been in there, that unchanging Paradise, for centuries already. Nothing had to change just because some strangers came with claims of the apocalypse. 

Then, she suspects they had to adapt their Doctrine. Their instruments told them of the end of the world, or perhaps their Queen did. But whatever their Doctrine says about the end of Weaver, it does not include Fel corruption. Their version is religious nonsense. 

As much as everyone speaks about the Queen, Stygia still has next to no idea who she is, other than a mighty warrior and a lover. What her role is remains unclear. What she looks like remains unclear. If the Queen had already been corrupted then, or if the Queen’s corruption happened due to her disbelief of the state of the surface—there could be a million explanations. 

Stygia and Illidan, in the form of ancient and abandoned golems, had intruded upon the Gardeners with ideas and offers that contradicted the Doctrine they have lived by, unchanging, for thousands of years. “We will heal the corruption from your moon, and it will once again be livable.” Such a statement must have been nonsense to people who apparently believe it is already inhabited by giant snakes, beings meant to represent the shadow cast by the Queen’s absence. 

They were to come back in a week. To return and be given a proper reception. Neither Demon Hunter expected anything less than a trap, or a closed door. They didn’t expect, half way through the week, that the Gardeners would attempt to use their Queen’s magic against them.

Stygia stands upon Illidan’s Titan-crafted starship. He points the slender ship toward the purple gas giant, Lu-Urit, asking Sacrifice to give him any information its perfectly-tuned sensors can gather. Stygia uses her Demon Hunter’s eyes. The mix of magic is strange. She’s never seen such a thing before. Space is mostly empty of ambient magic, but somehow this Queen is pushing whatever magic does exist in a funnel of psychic pull, concentrating it for tens of thousands of miles, until a solid flux of varying magical potential coalesces together. It’s only just visible through the late-afternoon atmosphere. Lu-Urit is a place of elements, and those silvery colors are what she sees behind the giant’s purple storms. 

Her hair is short and cut like a young human man’s. She is grateful that the only thing whipped back by the psychic shockwaves are her wings, that her hair doesn’t become her enemy in this volley. 

“The trees,” Stygia says to herself, watching them bend in unison with every shockwave. The animals have gone stark-quiet. 

Lu-Urit’s surface was once a many-banded thing, where rivers of storms turned against each other in slow motion. The purple gases have begun to whirl around a single point. The shadow cast by the new mega-storm (which is doubtless several times the size of Azeroth) confirm their suspicions. 

The Queen is pulling Lu-Urit to Weaver. 

The energy of the mass stolen in the Queen’s psychic pull will collide with Weaver’s surface in less than a day. 

“Stygia,” Illidan says over the communicator. She launches off the roof of Sacrifice, catches the psychically shaking winds with her outstretched wings, and lands through the unfurled side-door. Sacrifice’s viewport screen is occluded by dozens of readings. The craft is warning its pilot. “Your work will be erased in six hours.” 

“I see why she’s at the top of your list,” Stygia says. Their wing-tips brush against each other at the craft’s small Helm. She spreads her hands out on the console to get a better look at the data. “That’s a fun number. ‘50 kilograms of TNT equivalent quakes on one third of Moon’s surface, imminent.’ You need to kill her.”

“I need to kill her,” Illidan says. 

Her crew is already preparing. Dreamfoil will watch from Orbit, but several volunteers—mostly Demon Hunters—will be accompanying an elf-disguised Illidan in the bodies of golems. Stygia will stay on Dreamfoil. Illidan is a finely tuned killing machine. Once he gets in there, the only real obstacle should be finding the Queen. 

But if something goes wrong, it could go very wrong. The Garden could change shape completely, could eat him up and spit him out. They could have a thousand constructed golems, an army. The Queen could be sealed utterly away. 

This worst-case-scenario is something Stygia has a fix for. Gray Magic would work, if they only had enough time to invent something that could transport it in small quantities without needing Stygia herself to carry it. The real solution will have to, unfortunately, follow the way of the goblin. 

Illidan needles the craft through the rocking atmosphere. The planet shakes with an atomically stable rhythm. One psychic shockwave every two-and-a-half minutes, lasting fifteen seconds each. 

As the craft carries them past the pyramid, and back to a Dreamfoil now hovering above thirty-thousand feet with every single Shaman and Druid from their abandoned basecamp accounted-for, Stygia can’t help but feel pride in what they have already accomplished, even if the gas-giant’s onslaught might decimate it all. 

The ruins of the dead City around the pyramid are alive again. Saplings and grasses and weeds and flowers wave the young winds through. Canals fill with water, where they once filled with magic. There’s a thunderhead on the greening horizon, and this time, it is the white-black spectrum of rain. Not a single drop of Fel lashes the world with lightning from this cloud. It is water, slightly acidic from the state of the rest of Weaver, but a wide leap and jump beyond what it used to be. She is not an especially creative person (all scholars think that, though they are simply creative in a different direction), the metaphor of the cracked-open pyramid cap does not escape her. 

Noorip is still there. She has taken it upon herself to tear even more of the pyramid away. The enormous chamber she had hibernated within for thousands of years is now lit by foreign sunlight. Vines and trees, coaxed by her Life magics, have begun to pour out of the pyramid’s wound, covering the sides, visibly inching further and further about. She’s resting, now. Transfixed no longer by the erupting gas giant, she gazes out, uni-horn pointing brightly, at the canyons before the ruined city, cracks in the earth filled with living fungus and temperate plants, and a tiny stream of a creak. Stygia wonders what she recognizes. Eti-Manx flock around and above the pyramid in bird-shapes.

“An explosive, then?” Illidan says suddenly, calling back to a conversation from an hour ago, when they had left the Eti-Manx to panic and regroup and, if possible, appreciate the return of their god. What a full few days it has been, for them. 

“Yes.”

“...I remember that hobby of yours.”

“You do,” she says with mild surprise, laughing shortly. “Energetic forces without much magic involved… it’s interesting, no?”

“Your pursuit of that... interest... wasn’t mentioned.” 

She thinks back to the letters she used to write. Most of what she talked about, she has forgotten, other than broad strokes. The study of dwarvish mining charges, and the alchemical combustive reactions recorded by humans and the Forsaken, would most certainly not have gotten a mention. Mostly, because she is far from an expert. It was just a hobby. A failsafe, if any of her old ex-rival archmages ever came for her research, something she never ended up needing. 

Illidan’s probably noticing that disparity.

“I know enough,” she says. “I have an idea.”

“Don’t blow yourself up, making it.”

“I wouldn’t endanger them.” 

Illidan eyes her. It wounds, that look. 

“It has to be powerful enough to breach many wards, and many physical materials. Layers of steel—weakening walls, if not fully destroying them.”

“And the gnome—”

“Juli.”

“Juli can’t build this?”

“I wouldn’t put this on them. I already know what I need. The thing won’t become dangerous without the press of a button, and the meeting of the activation force between two pressed-together materials.”

He sighs. He’s looking out past the data, through the viewport, as Sacrifice rises to meet Dreamfoil, but she can tell he’s not really looking at anything. 

When Dreamfoil’s hatch opens, as Sacrifice pulls up to it, its door remains closed. He presses his claws onto the console like a Commander planning which inevitable death would be easiest on his crew. His hair drapes down low. Stygia, with careful claws, gathers the arc resting on his shoulder with the rest of the hanging band. His ear follows her subtly, and the many hard lines given to him by years of struggle and warfare surrounding his eyes shallow somewhat. 

“You are not worried about this fight,” she observes. 

“Never.” 

“Neither are you worried about failure.”

“Correct.”

She turns and comes to a stand before the closed hatch, ready to wait. Moments pass.

“What are we?” he asks. 

“I am the Captain of an experimental expedition, and you are the Taskmaster and Jailor for the Throne of the Titans.”

His horns bow beneath his wings.

“You mean something else,” Stygia states. 

His horns rise again, and he turns to face her from the Helm. There’s something new in his eyes. His frown is tense. 

Stygia does not know the answer. But she has a hint, perhaps one that he does not. 

“We cannot be together,” Stygia states plainly. “We cannot be as mates. As the united leaders of either of our endeavors.” 

“No,” he says, agreeing. 

“But we cannot be apart, can we? Our fates are intertwined. We can help each other.”

He watches her. 

“We have given up much. Our bodies. Our lives. Comfort in nearly all measures. The chance of any of these things returning ever again—it is gone. Overlooked are the million smaller sacrifices. I can never really draw again, never face my old apprentices, nor return to Silvermoon. You could never live the life part of you has always sought. ...Tyrande is a ghost on your shoulders.”

He looks away. Is it shame? “I do not think about what could have been,” he lies. Illidan thinks of his past less often than most people, Demon Hunter or no, but there are rare moments. He rejects the truth of it by instinct. And then it folds back into him. 

“Everyone does,” Stygia says gently. 

There is no rebuke in her voice. No hint of judgment. It is almost like she had shed her Demon’s skin for a moment. The purity of the sentiment angers him. He walks toward her quickly, puts his clawed hands on her scale-rough and rigid shoulders, and before he can think, draws her into an embrace. 

It is different, but they do not care. They are both tough with hardened skin and Fel-enhanced musculature, and worn through with scars. And they both must be wary of their horns. The way Illidan’s swoop to either side out of his skull, and the way Stygia’s rise up into the air, means his have hers in a sort of cage, with the end result being that they cannot well look away. She rests her forehead on his chin. He kisses her there. 

“Partners,” she whispers. 

“That is good enough for me.” 

They hold each other there, ignoring the questions coming through their near-muted communicators. Neither of them would admit that it is an action mutually sought for a long time. Illidan, in a denial, and Stygia, with anger for the mere existence of the feelings. Still, as they sit on the floor of Sacrifice, finding that it is easy—comfortable, even—to rest one’s arm over the other’s wing muscles, and discovering a type of trust neither of them had tasted before (mentally wrestling it as they rest within it), some part of them is relieved. Finally and greatly relieved. It is the relief of ancient regrets. 

But they cannot linger for long. They are wiser than this. 

19  
The Queen City is in chaos. 

Illidan did not look at himself in a mirror when Juli’s modified Draxfit transformation totem took effect. He could tell by the look in people’s eyes that it works. He is a night elf again, in illusion only, and clothed by someone’s extra robes. It is a ghost of his dead self that descends the shaft, riding on the back of a golem controlled by Kor’vas. 

The Eti-Manx had followed by instinct. Whatever threatened to level the surface near the pyramid would not spare them. Brink and a hundred or more others had shapeshifted into alien bird-bat creatures, and had dove sharply after him and the golems. 

The first sign that something was wrong was the hallway leading from the shaft to the City. It had sealed one of the three unused bulwarks. Illidan left its destruction to the ancient golems. A slow process, assisted by the thrown shadow magic of the Eti-Manx. The moment he begins to attack in earnest is the moment his totem fails. He has one knife to use in this form, freely, and a knife does not break down a magic door.

The second sign was the keening of the alarm. It is the same alarm as their initial foray into the city. This time, it carries a sense of incoming doom. 

As they stepped from the armed entryway (whose weapons still do not so much as twitch in the intruder’s direction) into the City proper, they could hear the residents’ panic. They are hard to track. The females fly to-and-fro carrying baskets of supplies, but the unmistakable barbs of weapons, both makeshift and not, puts the visitors sharply on-guard. The males use their four arms to fling themselves up and down the housing stacks like panicked Nerubians. 

Some of them are chasing others. 

Three females (two Seioni and a Follower ally) land tail-first before Illidan and the golems. While two of them points a spear out at anyone moving too close beyond the group, the other addresses the golem to his side, not recognizing him (and not having quite enough time to consume the visage of an alien). The Eti-Manx have long shadow-cloaked. Illidan imagines he feels Brink standing just behind him like an invisible dwarf. 

“Outsiders! There are outcasts! We are trying to save them from the Followers. Get to the Garden Gate!”

Illidan speaks up, and they immediately recognize his voice. “Will we meet resistance?” 

She looks him up and down, staggered by the strangeness of a Night Elf. “They will see the constructs and be pleased, but there is no guarantee. Go. Perhaps their adoration for you will save the outcasts.”

Not for the first time, Illidan feels grateful the elitist Gardeners never bothered to temper the opinions of the Citizens. They probably don’t even know that their own Followers adore the golems, or fail to read the implications of such an adoration.

Glass shatters and a Follower of the Doctrine is thrown through a window and pinned down by a Draxfit Dreamer. The Dreamer had altered parts of her body to that of alien fauna, her arms as large and clawed as a bear creature’s, and the uni-horn coming out of her forehead causes the shadows behind them to make noises of recognition. As Illidan starts to charge toward the wing of the City with the Garden Gate amphitheater, he is amused by the ferocity of that sleepy, chubby people. 

Behind them, as the golems and the hidden Eti-Manx keep pace with Illidan, the two Seioni take flight as a group of female Followers spots them and begin to swoop, and a second group of Followers dive, shouting, to stop the first group.

The Cultivator’s enchanting voice carries over the battling and terrified crowds. They reach the entrance to the Garden Gate amphitheater and beneath the sermon is the unmistakable sound of violence. 

At the center of it all floats a magic barrier. At the foot of the stage on which the Cultivator and the highest-ranked non-Gardener members of the Followers of the Doctrine serenade their crowds, two bleeding Gardeners have surrounded themselves by an orb of powerful protective magic. 

It is Master Ta-Naat and Apprentice Ba-Root. Their wings are shredded to bits. A river of gray-gold blood pours down their bodies, and their tails have split into the three legs of fear and excitement. Dozens of angered citizens slap their three-fingered hands against their barrier, with buzzing female citizens crashing into it with the momentum of flight. The Master and Apprentice could keep this up for weeks, if they weren’t bleeding out. At the opposite end of the huge chamber, there is a cacophony of violence and clattering metal. Raek-Wa and several other Seioni Warriors and Mages are barely holding ground against armed Followers. Two Draxfit, one hulking with selectively shapeshifted animal parts, making him look like several different flavors of aliens at once, and the other, casting offensive magic into the crowd of Followers, stand protectively over a small group of unarmed Seioni behind the line of Seioni warriors. Kanr-Aern is coiled in a near-meditative state. A small Seioni group of teenagers surrounds her, including Huert-Impe and her best friend, who dab at elderly Kanr-Aern’s bleeding eye with scraps of their own robes. They are sure that death is coming. 

“Brink,” Illidan commands, and the short alien responds by flashing his invisibility off for less than a second. “Save the golden-tattoo’d ones,” he points. “The ones being bullied. They are good, and they remember your people. They will recognize you.”

They show no sign of acquiescing until the confused cries of Followers announce their arrival. Their blades and their envenomed shapeshifted fangs drop Followers visibly, even from the gate. 

Finally, the golems are noticed. The Cultivator herself spots them, over the crowd, and she motions them over. The crowd nearest the stage’s stairs manage to part for them, despite the chaos. “Sisters of the Queen. Welcome! You have come to witness, to assure the death of the Betrayers? Have you heard of their sins?”

Illidan scowls openly, comfortable in the knowledge that they don’t read his face. Betrayers. She has addressed only the golems. Illidan steps forward. “Cultivator. (His voice is recognized again, and they observe him) What are their sins?” He sees someone else with the robes of a high ranking Follower on stage finally notice what’s happening at the other end of the chamber, watches him startle and catch his Fellow’s attention, and point. 

“Your Sisters threw them out of Paradise. They cursed the Doctrine, they went for the Queen.” 

Illidan slowly looks over the crowd, past the hovering Arcane barrier of the bleeding Master and Apprentice, where the Seioni pocket of dissidents, with the help of the hiding and shapeshifting Eti-Manx, has finally scattered the Followers. 

The Cultivator’s eyes narrow when she follows his look. 

He takes out a dagger and it pours her gray-gold over the stage. The Cultivator drops so quickly, she doesn’t have time to close her eyes. The golems occupy the stage, the Demon Hunters controlling them, believing it is now or never, end the lives of the elderly priests. The dagger clatters to the floor. He can feel his glaives on his back burning to be used, but the moment he grabs them, the illusion keeping them hidden would collapse completely. He must remain this way with so many eyes on him. He must not be seen Demonic. If, for no other reason, than for Stygia.

The crowd screams. 

“Followers. You have been mislead,” Illidan says sharply, loudly. Many listen. The Master and Apprentice in their floating barrier seem to notice him for the first time, and hands finally cease slapping and beating their protective magic. “Drop your weapons. The Seioni, the Draxfit are not your enemies. Truth belongs to everyone. We are here to reveal it.”

Master Ta-Naat, with every last scrap of strength, hurls herself and her apprentice within their barrier onto the stage. She collapses as soon as her three legs touch the stone. Apprentice Ba-Root rushes to her side. The barrier is gone. Citizens at the foot of the stage eye them with malice and shout crude words. 

Illidan stands before them. He looks to either side (the golems have identifying markers, but they do look extremely similar), sees Uunem’s golem, and waves the ambitious alien ambassador over. 

“Talk to them.” It is the only instruction he gives. He bends to examine the fallen Master. Uunem begins to orate, and because he looks like an ancient golem (now with an entrenched association of kindness and divinity), the Followers quiet and listen. The Seioni and revealed militia of Eti-Manx at the other end of the chamber stand defensively. A group of Followers surround the Seioni in a protective ring, pointing weapons at other Followers. Illidan hadn’t noticed them until now. Not all Followers appear so easily duped. The rest of the city seems to be quieting down.

“Your voice,” Ba-Root says, tiredly, exasperated. Her un-bound hair fronds are vibrating with fear and slicking back close to her body. “You’re an alien? Please. Can you help her?”

He was never a healer, even at the height of his Arcane prowess. Anything the Arcane could do to heal was always outperformed by countless other disciplines of magic, and thus it was a waste of time. Healing is, now more than ever, a far cry from his skill set. 

But there are sensible actions to take. 

“Tear strips of your clothing off. Wrap them around your wounds to close them and apply pressure to the area. You are alien to me, too, but this could help.”

She does. Then, impressing him with her bravery, she cauterizes their wounds with fire magic. 

“Explain this,” Illidan says. 

“Thank you for seeing with your eyes,” the Apprentice says. The pain of the ordeal has her resting on the floor. “They’re… W-we tried to force it. To force the plan into action. It has been thousands of years. I-I thought—my Master had—she was born two hundred years after they put themselves to sleep.” She shakes her head weakly, trying to stay focused. Illidan impatiently regards Uunem’s golem. The people continue to listen to him with rapt attention. That draenei deserves accolades. “She always thought there was something wrong. And she was right. The plan never happened. They promised, then the Doctrine changed. It’s n-not right. Maybe Neel is Weaver. You are turning Weaver into Neel for us. It’s t-time for them to awaken. But we failed.”

“How must they be awakened?” Illidan asks quickly. 

“You want to try?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t. I-I can. I could do it, if I were there.”

“Where is the Queen?” he asks, trying not to sound demanding. 

“They’re…” Ba-Root’s tangled feet form into a singular tail, and she rises slowly, casting glances at the crowd. “They’re abusing her. Forcing her to awaken, to use the Afterlife against Weaver itself. They want you all gone.”

“Where is she?”

“Behind the pool. Behind the sleepers. Th-there’s a door, it looks like a circular seal (the thing he had thought some sort of huge round religious painting immediately springs to mind), and if you can breach it… most of them are there.”

He takes the violet keystone out of his pocket. It shines against her alien features. She nods. “You were lucky it was mine. You could be dead by now.”

“I’m going in,” he says. “When I come back out, the way will be clear.”

He stands. She rises on her snake tail. “Wait,” she says. “Don’t hurt Jo. Jo-Uiia. He’s the one with the pink hair, two of his eyes are always occluded by lenses. He tried to help in secret.” She makes a trill of pain, and clutches both arms closely to her torso. “Matron Kuba-Sette must die,” the young alien says. 

He nods. Three of the golems—Uunem included—stay behind to keep the Queen City from eating itself again. Ba-Root coils over her Master, Ta-Naat, protectively, though she is grievously weak. After Illidan and two other golems have destroyed the sealed bulwark at the center of the stage’s back wall, and after they have used the beautiful glowing violet keystone to activate and pass through the only entry point in or out of the Garden, Brink himself stands upon the stage. He is in full view. The Seioni are in awe. The Followers do not recognize his shape. Brink crouches before Ba-Root and Ta-Naat. Nothing will harm them, if he has any say in the matter. 

The weapons misfire. The golem holding the black ward-scatterer steps through the keystone portal first. He—Feradon the silvered Demon Hunter—hurls the thing as far down the entry chamber as he can. And it works. The arsenal tries to take aim at the intruders. A massive array of laser-cannons fueled by the Well beyond, in the Garden, immediately shoot, and every one of them misses their target. They are way off. The cannons demolish the wall behind the portal-gate. Illidan takes off the totem, here, pocketing it carefully, feeling the Demon skin of his wings taste air, now unburdened by illusionary magic, feeling the true weight of his horns instead of the ghost-version of it. His claws unsheathe. His tattoos cut a bright light from previously berobed skin. The robe bursts as he amasses in size, far past the height of an average night elf.

He is unbound. They will know fear.

As the weapons misfire for a second time and begin to recalibrate, he Rushes from one end of the long chamber straight to the other. Their barrels and bodies clash to the floor in an instant. Huge cannons the size of one of Teldrassil’s branches are reduced to junk by the rending of Fel magic brutally enforced by blade and by fury. He keeps his glaives out, now. The golems carry the totem with them as they rush to keep up, but now, Illidan might as well be alone, and he leaves them behind.

It doesn’t take long before their blood is on his hands. It is gray, pulsing gold for small moments before going a dark sludge-like color for good. How many are awake? Twenty? He counts them as he finds them, taking their keystones—they hide, as the Garden’s alarms keen, a noise without drills or preparations, a warning that could mean almost anything. One of them was lounging in a copse of trees. Another was hanging up a painting, having just set up what appears to be a garden party for future guests. The rest, he finds hiding. These “Knights of Mana”, as they were once called, have no fighting instincts whatsoever. Constructs awaken to come to their defense, but it has been thousands and thousands of years since they were ever needed, and many of them are slow, broken, or stay sleeping. The rest of those elitist Eti-Ov who are not in the chamber with the Queen, he dispatches easily. 

Only one of them tried to attack. Illidan’s Titan’s necklace deflected the weak bolt of lightning, and it was all over.

In different wings of the massive imperial Garden, there are central constructs, five in total, and each the size of a human barn, all sleeping. They seem to be carved after alien fauna. If Illidan stopped long enough to read their nameplates, he would see the Queen’s real name written beneath small poems. She had carved each of these giant constructs, and personally given them life. That they haven’t budged from their spot on this bloody day would be a marker of their loyalty to someone who has, for all intents and purposes, been dead for a long time. None of them move even a centimeter to protect the other Gardeners. And why would they? 

The hardest part, Illidan finds, as he learns to squint through the vibrating magic of the Garden to look for signs of life, is resisting the pull of the Well. If he’s not careful, he could mistake it for a mere magically-infused lake, the way Suramar used to color their waters. But that’s not the problem. The Demon inside him wants, more than anything, to consume it and use it to erupt and explode and destroy everything in the star system. Or worse, make it into a portal, and draw other members on Illidan the Taskmaster’s list where they aren’t wanted, and would be doubly difficult to take care of. 

He resists. He always will. 

There is life through this gate, but when he sees pink hair, he again takes out the totem. Somehow, even here, it works. He is a night elf again.

The sealed door (strange to call a giant round painting a door) is in the enourmous library behind the sleeping Gardener’s pods. He can tell it won’t open to him alone. Not in the scant three-to-four hours remaining until the end of the world. Jo is here. He is frightened, and his pink hair-fronds lay flat against his back the way Apprentice Ba-Root’s had. 

Feradon enters after him. “Do you need it, Lord Illidan?”

“I will need it,” Illidan says, motioning the golem over. He turns to the Gardener. “I am told you tried to help them awaken the sleeping ones.”

“Y-yes. I tried. It is so dangerous. She will—” 

“You’re not in danger.”

“The others… You…”

“They’re dead.”

The alien rises in alarm. His three legs wobble. “They were nice people.”

“Were they nice, or were they fools?” Illidan growls. 

“B-both,” the alien gulps. “They’re through here,” he offers, pointing with two left hands at the giant round painting. “I can’t get in. They won’t let me. I think they know—” 

The alien’s shivering worsens at the thought of what the Doctrine’s elitist leader would do to him. 

“Go through the Garden Gate. Get Ba-Root, convince her to awaken the sleepers. You are not in danger, as long as you do this.”

He stammers something, then sprints with three swift legs out the door. 

The painting is hard to pin down—much of it is abstracted. There appear to be two moons orbiting an alien face. A long, vivid, luscious purple robe covers most of the starkly bright alien’s body. Illidan loses no time in setting up the explosive device Stygia had made for this specific situation. He can’t help but admire the shape of it, ignoring the fact that a smith had fashioned the case for her, simply because she made it.

Dreamfoil orbits Weaver 30 degrees away from the point of projected impact. They are safe. But they worry for their missing crew members, those who volunteered. They worry for the ones whose bodies rest among the urns of the shaft-chamber as their minds project into golem-bodies many kilometers away. 

Vince pushes his hair back. Injury recovery does not account for how antsy and uncomfortable he has been.

“Georgia,” Vince begins. Georgia stops fiddling with an instrument at her desk in the Helm room. 

“What is it,” she drawls. Juli looks over from her papers, eager to be distracted. 

“Ma’am… If Uunem’s body is… destroyed, will his mind be stuck in the construct?”

“We couldn’t dig the City out to even know for sure,” she mutters, writing something down. She looks back up to see Vince pulling his hair and returning to his manic pace. “Huckden, you have data to digest.”

Juli’s metallic foot slams down on the Legion-crafted floor. Georgia looks over, clears her gritty Forsaken throat, and makes a hand gesture as though saying “yeah, yeah.”

“The Titans chose Illidan for good reason. Uunem will be fine.”

He nods once, thinks, then nods a few more times. “That beast is good at one thing,” he says. “Killing. We can trust him to get that right, at least.”

Juli and a few other folks in the Helm look cautiously toward their Captain. She doesn’t seem to react (though her back is turned and her wings cover much), and they go back to their work. 

A funnel of Lu-Urit is thorning out of its body like an arrow. Stygia watches it gather itself. In a few hours, it will close the distance between itself and Weaver at a rapid pace, if it isn’t stopped. 

But it will be stopped. This is merely a light show. Illidan has everything he needs. 

The Library is decimated. Illidan feels but the slightest twinge of disgust for the necessity of it. But these books were not useful spell tomes, or the biographies of accomplished Mages. They were lies. The Doctrine in so many thousands of pages. This is what he believes. 

He catapults himself—his real self, the winged and horned body he prefers—through the breach Stygia’s explosive charge had made. 

He lands, wings-outstretched, on a pile of thick rubble spilling into a huge, round chamber. And there she is, surrounded by a dozen Gardener elitists, all of them participating in a ritual. Matron Kuba-Sette stands before the Queen. She turns and eyes Illidan in irritation.

20  
This is her bed chamber, or it was. It is a dusty place now, a museum of a way of life that hasn’t been relevant in anyone’s living memory. Long half-bare bookcases stretch from floor to ceiling. There is an unfinished sculpture against one wall. The Queen is taller than the tallest Eti-Ov by four times. Her wings are longer, bursting with purples and reds and violets and indigos, and they reach out to the very edges of the cylindrical chamber, stricken by fitful sleep. She had both the four arms of a male Eti-Ov and the two wings of a female specimen, and her tail seems to lack the splitting capabilities of her subjects. The chamber’s floor is yet another pool of this planet’s Well—no, Illidan corrects himself. It’s covered by glass several feet thick. Of course it is, for the Queen is half-corrupted, and thus, a danger to it. 

A slash of black-and-lime Fel corruption stretches from her shoulder to her middle-tail. Two of her arms are bulked by its influence, and their green-tipped envenomed claws drip their corruption onto heavily warded tiles which, impressively, dissipate the evil substance. One of her beautiful wings has several marks of ugly slag ruining the swirling rainbow of colors. 

Illidan knew from the outset that she was corrupted, in one way or another. The Throne had said as much. But these Gardeners are making it worse. Centimeter by centimeter, the corruption, through the stress of their forced ritual upon the sleeping Queen, is growing. 

Two of the aliens breaks the circle ritual by command of the evil Matron Kuba-Sette. They are shadowy versions of the other Eti-Ov. Their skin is a light gray, and their white hair-fronds stray electrically from their heads like feral quills. They dress in black and a deep navy. 

They weren’t here, when they first entered the Garden. Or were they, but hidden somehow? Perhaps he would have sensed them if he had been physically present, to observe with his Demon Hunter’s eyes, but he suspects not. 

“We are ready for you,” one of them says. 

“Vile speaker of untruths,” the other says, and produces from her deep robe a glass orb. 

They’re wielders of shadow. They had eons to figure out the Eti-Manx’s tricks, and they seem to have found success. Whatever is in that orb had been hidden from his vision until just now. These two could wield magic like a Warlock and he might not notice. 

As she raises the glass orb into the air, Illidan Rushes in a sudden Demonic charge, catching the un-tested wretch by surprise, and cutting her hand clean off. The Orb had begun to glow. Before he can catch the alien with his other glaive, a clatter of hastily thrown magic breaks his concentration. Her brother, or twin, or lover, or whatever, had assaulted him with a bolt of chaos. It hurt—it always does—but it finds no purchase on grounds already thoroughly corrupted. His Titan-crafted necklace rings in his mind. It was a strong spell.

Illidan smiles at him, flashing his wings. The sister is screaming from the pain, and her wings buzz and lift her, three legs outstretched and scrabbling, into the air. Her brother has reached into his own robes and produced something black and green.

His warglaive has pierced the brother’s chest before he can do anything with it. But something dawns on him. He hadn’t cut through flesh. Instead, he had—apparently—cut through wards.

They’re undead, he realizes. Besides these twins, two other Gardeners are undead, with the same white hair and gray skin. He had pierced through an alien ribcage. The truth of it had been hidden by a cloak of that same magic-obfuscating shadow.

He smashes the alien’s skull with the flat of his warglaive, and this one is dead in earnest. 

The orb rolling to the edge of the floor is flashing with light. No, with capital L Light, like that of the sun. Illidan has no way of knowing what manner of trick lies in the Orb. He is too distracted by the object on his chest, affixed to him by the now-dead brother. He sees that the sister is waiting, observing, attached to an upper corner of the chamber like a housefly. 

Then he understands why. 

His Titan necklace rings out. The green object pierces his heart. Straight through. 

The cloaking wards they discovered, they had apparently affixed to everything they made. He has no idea what other tools they have, or how strong they are. 

But he has one thing on his side. His two clawed hands smash against the tile, and he coughs Demon blood before him, his wings vibrating with pain. The sister caws with victory. Her caws turn to confusion. It had been a spear of chaos magic, that pierced him through. A raw and uncontrolled fury of it, unhardened and unrefined, and made even less effective through the protection of the necklace’s field. His body copes with it well. It is like drinking water to him. He tears the device off of his chest and it clatters across the floor.

The Matron turns away from the ritual to regard the intruder, then she turns to judge the undead sister clinging to the wall. 

“Met-Mada. Why is he still alive?” Matron Kuba-Sette says. Her hair-fronds are a bright yellow that fades to platinum white, and are by far the longest of anyone there. Is she undead, too, or simply extremely old?

“I don’t…! That magic… it is supposed to…!”

“You told me it was the strongest, child, the strongest magic ever discovered.” the Matron says. Illidan can tell she’s twisting off on her portion of the ritual, placing her part of the casting onto the others. 

“You saw what it did! I was not lying! This is a Truth! If he has survived it, then tha—”

The Matron rises like a wind-serpent, points at Met-Mada crawling on the wall, and Met-Mada explodes in a shower of viscera. 

His Rush to meet her is cut off half-way. The Orb had finally performed its use. Something collides into him, but it does not stay long. 

A being of Light flings itself about the room. The ritual is half-disrupted as part of the circle is thrown by the creature in every direction, causing the Gardeners to scream. Illidan is already at the ready. He uses the abandoned four-poster bed as cover. 

The being is an ancient god—what seems to be the meeting of a Loa and the magic of their sun, or perhaps an encounter with a Naaru. He is like a manta ray and a dragonfly twisted together, and he sings a high-pitched melody of alarm and confusion. 

“Fools! They deserved their fate!” the Matron yells. “He remains uncontrolled. Liars! When I bring them back I will kill them again and again!” 

The being screams in an ancient language, and Illidan’s translator fails to parse it. He sees him (and there’s the glint of recognition in his five eyes, as many Loa recognize Fel forms) and he charges. Illidan dashes away, barely quick enough. Light itself is the fastest force in the Universe. Beings that use it to its fullest potential are impossible to outrun. 

He needs to kill the Matron. She snapped her fingers and killed the undead alien. Can she do that to anyone? Just the undead? Her Followers alone? He goes for her again, dodging a splash of frostfire she throws, and has to Rush off-kilter to avoid the snapping mandibles of the Loa of Light. 

He tries one more time, coming up with a plan, when he sees the two golems peaking out of the breach of the chamber. Feradon raises the black totem gift of the Eti-Manx into the air and heaves it into the center of the ritual. 

The room shakes. An incredibly earthquake, physical and psychic and magic in nature, rends the Garden’s walls. Books fall from shelves. The unfinished statue collapses. A tall mirror shatters. The ritual is stopped. The Being of Light flings himself out of the breach where the golems are standing, and Illidan worries for only a moment of what the thing will do if it sees Ba-Root trying to awaken the sleepers. 

He slaughters three of the ritualists as they struggle to stand. Catapulting off a wall, he nearly impales the Matron, but her mastery over the Arcane causes him to ricochet off her barrier. Twisting, he slams his hooves onto the opposite wall, and unleashes his eyebeams, tricking her into believing they are aimed at her, then aiming them at the remaining ritualists. 

“You are the only Knight of Mana within the Garden,” Illidan remarks, being both literal and figurative, leaping out of the way of a powerful volley of the Arcane. They manifest as spears, two-pronged tridents, and they remain pierced through the bedchamber of the Queen, destroying the beautiful brick and tile work.

“I was the First,” she yells. “How dare you take from me what I earned.” 

She wrenches her arms, and parts of the wall behind him tear off in a peppering of rocky shards. One of them tears a small hole through one of his wings. 

The Queen’s outstretched wings wilt. She, too, is hit by the brickwork. The Matron gasps when she notices. The distraction allows him to fling himself to the wall behind her, then, finally, the burning green metal of his warglaives poke out of her torso. Flesh. She was immortal, not undead. It doesn’t matter anymore. 

She falls, too weak to coil her three legs together again. Her golden blood spills onto the glass. She will die a meter or two from her moon’s Well. 

“No… I saved her. I saved her. Demon.” 

“So you do know the word,” he crouches down to regard her. 

“They didn’t need to know… I protected them.” 

“No. I do. Stygia does. Your moon is a new Garden. You will never witness it.”

“Wicked… you were supposed to be banished from Weaver. It’s not my fault. Not my fault.” She falls to the floor, belly-down. Too weak to push herself to face up—to face the surface of a planet she refused to acknowledge—and instead, her eyes go blind from the hot light of the Well. “Not… my fault…”

The life leaves her. 

Feradon’s golem is in the chamber now, the other having left to pursue the Loa of Light. 

The totem has not just stopped the ritual. It’s doing something to the Queen. She’s coiled upright on the floor, clearly still in a slumber of one nature or another. She’s shaking. 

“The corruption is taking over. Should I move the totem?” Feradon immediately goes for it, but Illidan’s outstretched claws stop him. 

Whatever wards protecting the Queen in her sleep from being overcome by the corruption are being dimmed by the presence of the squat onyx totem. Black-lime begins to overtake everything else. 

He hesitates. Feradon watches him. His hesitation is a rare thing, and the other hunter can only wonder at its cause. Gray Magic could reset her, couldn’t it? It could. But… this much power… this destructive force cannot be trusted to any one person. 

Yet, he trusts Stygia. 

No. There is no time to deliberate. If he felt like her corruption wouldn’t simply result in the continuation of her imminent assault on Weaver, he would bind her and bring her to the surface himself. There is no time. 

Her blood is silver. The exact same mercury of the dragon-King’s. He hisses and avoids it, leaving one of his glaives poking through her torso. The comm erupts with cheers and questions that he doesn’t answer, and he is pleased to hear that the gas giant has ceased its preparations. The Queen wilts, and wilts, her breath slowing, when suddenly Feradon’s golem collapses behind him. 

Illidan’s hair whips around as he seeks the cause. Feradon’s golem is now deactivated, folded in on itself. He puts the communicator to his cheek. 

“Golem team. Your physical bodies may be in danger.”

“The Eti-Manx have fallen asleep,” Uunem says, afraid. “All of them. Why?”

There’s one thing the Eti-Manx and Feradon have in common. The Queen’s silver blood pools over the glass patterns in the floor, replacing the light of the Well with a pleasant dimness. 

Illidan tears his glaive out of the dead Queen and vaults over the sleeping golem, leaving the Queen’s chamber behind. He nearly leaves the destroyed library without attuning to the elvish form. The totem is there, still, in his pocket, and he becomes a night elf spitefully, then rushes out of the library with speed no elf could copy. 

Apprentice Ba-Root is casting magic much too complex for someone so weak and injured. She’s on a magic disc hovering over the huge lake-like Well. The pods lining the wall are glowing, the shadows of the sleeping Gardeners within are starker than ever. Her Master is there, too, propped up on one wobbling hand, struggling to stay conscious, and giving instructions. On the far shore of the Well near the entrance to the Garden is the other golem, and Jo the alien, looking distraught. 

The pods on the top rows are detaching, plopping safely into the Well’s waters, and drifting out into the body of the magic waters like discarded petals of a Titan’s bouquet. They begin to glow.

“Lord Illidan,” the Demon Hunter says. “You killed her, the Queen. Why have the Eti-Manx fallen asleep?”

Brink is there, as down as his Fellows. 

“Where did the creature of Light go?” Illidan asks. 

“I did not have time to pursue. It seems to hide from us.”

Illidan shakes his head, missing the weight of his horns. “Keep alert. There is a Loa around.” Then he speeds through the Garden Gate. Before stepping through the portal, he drops several violet keystones on the floor next to it, turns to leave, then, enraged by impatience, smashes one of them against a wall, such that its proximity effects hopefully keep the portal open, so long as no one cleans the smashed particles.

If she’s hurt, Stormkettle will pay.

Stygia watches the giant storm emerging from the purple gas giant just begin to recede when her vision clouds. She steadies herself on the head console. The Helm room is all cheers. Something is happening. Someone is there. Someone else’s memories are… she feels so tired, suddenly. 

He’s waiting for her. It has been so long. 

Juli’s hyperactive ears notice her fall first. 

“Captain!” Juli shouts, and her Mage underlings, Georgia close in tow, jump out of their desks. 

Her wings cushion the fall. She is sound asleep, staring up into the stars. 

21  
The Eti-Manx are witness. Strangely, three frightening-looking aliens are, too. She doesn’t mind. The Eti-Manx are here, their eyes a starfield of reflection. They know her and do not, simultaneously. She smiles at them. 

Her tail feels newborn grasses. They brush like the fuzz of a plitky puppy. He is waiting for her, in the shadows of the young trees in the Canyon Path. He is a dragon. He steps out of the shade, and is Eti-Di again. The only other. They both see it. The last Eti-Di—one of them, half-dragon, and the other, champion and vessel of Lu-Urit. 

Weaver as they knew it is gone. But, as they push past the young grasses on their way to one another, and as they see the kindly aliens in the distance who plant saplings with the tenderness of a native resident, the Queen and the King are hopeful for the future, as they used to be, long before the poisoning of the Garden. 

Their hands meet. Four in four. The Eti-Manx watch them embrace. A chapter is ending. They feel it, even if their histories and stories were stolen from them by the ravages of survival. They feel it come to a close. Their silver bodies make her smile. 

“What did you give them?” she asks. 

“My guilt and my sorrows,” he responds. 

“A good thing to shed. I think I will too.”

They rise. Lu-Urit waits for both of them to join their people in the Afterlife she has made. 

The druids in the fields look over. They do not see the field of sleeping Eti-Manx, projecting in a crowd to watch their King and Queen depart. They do not see their own Captain and two crewmates, Kor’vas and Feradon observing in a confused but pleasant dreamscape. Instead, they, like the shamans, feel a change in the air. And then, with a small shaking, a column rises out of the soil, where the ghosts of Weaver’s past depart together. 

The column becomes a tower. The tower is wrapped by a tree—a vivid and purple-leafed species long extinct. The tree grows, and grows, and it radiates an aura of Life and the Arcane, and it lulls those nearby with feelings of peace. 

22  
There are rain clouds in the distance. They’re rolling high over a green plane. There’s a World Tree—which World Tree is that? It’s wrapped around a gray tower.

Where am I? She turns her head away from the world. This place is dark.

Illidan. She sees his amber eyes. We must have won. The Demon threat is gone. Azeroth...

His hand is on her cheek. It is rougher than she thought it would be. 

She blinks. The light fades, and when it comes back, it brings sense with it. 

She’s in her room, now. The view of the moon’s surface yawning over her bed—that must have been the infirmary. Why is she here instead? 

Illidan is reading, sitting on her desk. He does hate to use chairs like a normal person, granted he is pretty bulky and tall. Stygia herself has trouble with most furniture made for normal folks. 

She squints. It’s her book. She had published a few tomes in her time. It’s the last one, in his hands, the one she was most proud of. Intended to be the first in a series on nullification theory. The first contains breadcrumbs into her formula for Gray Magic. But, if Illidan has retained a lick of Mage sense, he will quickly realize that too much information is missing. 

She hadn’t known yet, then. Not really. She knew how to draw elemental magic and residue away from a small object, permanently, but the method back then was terribly inefficient. 

She traces his posture with her gaze. Looking for anomalies or wounds where there are none, but also looking purely to look. He has unbound his hair, for some reason, and it pours over his shoulders. He turns a page, and she notices a new scar at the center of his chest. 

It is nice to be in this space, just before waking. She knows with full certainty that the most important person in her universe would come if she called. That if she fell asleep, he’d still be there when she awakened. A unique moment, a rare moment, for either of them. It must die in her hand. She enjoys it for its precious lifespan. 

She has only just begun to stir when his head snaps in her direction. He moves away from the illumination of the planet through the window (Juli had brought Dreamfoil back to the surface—she would do such a thing, especially in celebration), away from her desk, and he crouches by her bed. 

“Hi,” she mumbles, turning her head to face him.

He says nothing. Instead, he kisses her. 

Their horns chafe against each other. He draws back by inches. They breathe each other’s air, and she is comforted by the dark drape of his hair around her face. His hand finds her jaw. She unburies hers from the covers, and she draws her finger tips from his pec to his shoulder, feeling every scar. 

“What happened?” Illidan asks, whispering, and putting his forehead against hers. 

His walls are down. She kisses him, her hand making its way to his neck, running through his hair. She sits up in bed, swinging her cloven feet off the side facing him. As though to keep him near—to keep him grounded—she holds onto his swooping horn. 

“I was asleep. We all felt the Queen’s death. All of us who had been blessed by the King’s blood. We… watched them move on.”

“Who?”

“The King’s spirit waited for her death. He knew it was near. They departed together.” She sighs. “It was beautiful.” 

Her hand finds his new scar, the one at the center of his chest. 

He smoothly transitions to a kneel, tucking his wings close, his head at chest-level, gazing upward into her eyes. “They thought they discovered Fel magic all on their own.”

“They thought a lot of things,” Stygia says. 

“It was a spear of unbridled chaos. Not hardened into a proper projectile, nor attuned for a real purpose. No proliferating curse, no affliction of entropy. Like trying to poison an Azerothian using a vial of their own blood type.”

Stygia laughs. “That is too good. A perfect showcase of what cowardice can do. I wonder what other principles they ‘discovered’, with no way to properly test, or to collaborate.”

“They wasted thousands of years. None of them could fight, except for their leader.”

She runs her claws through his hair, lightly scratching his scalp. He closes his eyes from the sensation. He showered. “How was she?”

“Rusty. Used to controlling people, not opponents.”

“One would think she would have prepared.”

“One would. They had a tortured Loa, trapped in an Arcane prism. They presumed it would follow their commands. They were wrong.”

“Is the Loa alright?”

“Sure. He took control of the Garden. He’s trying to figure out what happened to the Weaver he knew, and he has about seven hundred newly awakened Eti-Ov wondering the same thing. Those statues have come to life, too, by his decree. The Seioni have lost their minds over him.” He gestures with a claw. “I don’t care for the details. The Garden belongs to the Seioni, for whatever reason, but they’re letting anyone in, as long as their Loa approves.”

“The Well…” Stygia thinks. “They must understand. It needs to be safe. How…”

“The awakened Gardeners drained it. It’s returning to the Worldsoul. They have plans.” He shrugs, and cradles the arm Stygia has grabbing his horn in one of his huge claws. 

“This isn’t your forte,” Stygia smirks. 

“I did what I came for. Their Well is tucked away, their people awakened, their planet healing.”

“You did what you came for.”

They regard each other. He stands, hooks his hand under the crook of her knees, holds her back beneath the muscles of her wings, and picks her up. He sits on the bed, that way, with her cradled in his arms, her horn resting against the curve of his. 

“You brought me in here,” Stygia points out, speaking softly. 

“Yes.” 

“Why?”

He chuffs. 

She laughs, a laugh as close to a giggle as she has gone in a long time. The sound makes him draw her closer. “You wanted to get away from people. As soon as you heard I was safe, sleeping…” 

“Yes.” 

“Thank you. I… I prefer this.” 

“I know.” They kiss again. “Stygia.”

“Yes?”

“Leave the investigating up to your inferiors.” 

She smiles, brushing her knuckles against the hard lines of his jaw. “Good idea. Safer that way.”

“No alien blood involved.”

“No alien dragons, either, hopefully.”

“They…” Illidan begins. He presses his nose against hers, bothered by something. She makes a noise of curiosity. “Drop any hope you might have of preserving yourself there, in hiding, one day... when your work is done.”

“Why?” 

“There is no universe in which the awakened Gardeners and the Seioni would accept a Demon Hunter walking among them.”

She sighs, slowly. “I know. It was a dream. It is always going to be a dream. We are rescuing planets from the same power stirring inside me. They are smart, not to trust in something that smells, feels, and looks like a Demon.”

“But the Universe is vast,” he says breathily. 

“It is.”

“We have eons. If a power comes after you, for your work, we will find a way.”

She closes her eyes, resting her head against his, and he cradles her close. She does not believe it. But it is a nice thought. 

No, her future is clear. She can see it perfectly. The crew of Dreamfoil may make it ten years, a century, hundreds of centuries, but eventually, something will try to stop her. When it comes for her—and it must come for her alone, as the lone wielder of this complex and barely-possible magic—rather than allow herself to be twisted to something else’s desires, and rather than ending up at the wrong side of Illidan’s glaives, she will turn Gray Magic to her heart, and erase what she has become. Ystail Duskfield will walk again, remembering nothing, knowing nothing. Stygia will be no more. 

They stay there, in her quarters, for a long time. Dreamfoil sweeps 150,000 square kilometers of corrupted land under the supervision of its competent crew, going ahead with the schedule as they know their Captain would prefer. She stands on the roof of her vessel after the sun has set. Lu-Urit smiles her purple smile upon the surface. The gas giant’s storms have taken a much different shape, since the death of the Queen. Her bands have different colors to them, and the next era will come to memorize a different pattern than the ones before. There, upon the roof, sitting on her side, with the young wind pushing her wings, with the ghosts of a planet reborn carrying on to the next realm, she watches Sacrifice carry Illidan into the stars, his hair tied back up, his heart already prepared to face the next Task. He will do fine. And, she suspects, if he needs anything, he knows who to come to. 

Dawn brings gentle showers over the growing purple tree perched on its gray tower. The tree watches the residents of the pyramid come and go (mostly going). The city outside is picked over by Eti-Ov, and the Eti-Manx guide them through their old lands. Dreamfoil is gone—she has disappeared over the horizon, ready to sweep and clean more and more and more of their moon in preparation for the natives’ newborn thirst for exploration. 

Felora Firewreath is the first alien to touch the tree. A world of life and death cycles in her eyes, and, though her tears embarrass her, her Shamans and Druids find it endearing.

The Queen City must heal. Citizen had turned against Citizen. The Followers of the Doctrine have fallen apart, and there will be much conflict with this crisis of identity and lack of leadership. They seek normalcy and comfort, as any being does. Dreamfoil will not interfere with this conflict. It will represent the growing pains any civilization must endure. The blood hasn’t stopped spilling. But the world will only learn more and more love as it ages. 

The Gardeners, awakened by the brave Ba-Root, whose Master could not make it into the new era for the wounds of the one before, pour out of their Arcane bunker. The waters of their Well are given back to the Worldsoul. She stirs in her sleep, this small soul, and her dreams begin to know love and beauty. The Gardeners can feel it. These Knights of Mana deserve their title far more than the likes of the dead-and-forgotten Matron. The first thing they do is not enact measures of control over their citizens, but to build houses, and plumbing, and canals, and gardens, coaxing Paradise onto the surface one timid step at a time. 

The Pyramid itself is given to the Eti-Manx. It is the seat of their god, Noorip, and the growing place of Noorip’s cured infant brother. Noorip helps the animals of the world remember who they used to be. Over the burned ashes of the ruins their late King destroyed, the Eti-Manx build their thorny houses and their fruit-orchards. 

Ba-Root remains in the Garden. At least, for a while. The living statues, things with beautiful carved faces and glowing eyes that amble like walking mountains, they remember the Queen. They have much to tell little Ba-Root. Lessons to impart for the ushers of the new Era. She sets her heart on the themes they whisper. Brink, the Eti-Manx, will be her friend for the rest of their lives, and she will make sure his people are never hurt again. The Loa of Light beloved by the Seioni, too, remembers, though the scars suffered from the old era confuse his memories. He flies through the self-contained world of the Garden and protects its gate, and guards the open vein pouring into the heart of the moon. They, too, become friends, the flying Loa and Ba-Root. 

In the fifth chamber of the Garden, where the statue of an extinct nine-legged being walks, they find the graves of those Citizens stolen by the dead Gardeners for their foul experiments. They bury the ex-Gardeners there, whose wounds spill with a curious green and acidic liquid which no one dares touch, and the statue makes sure they harm nothing and no one ever again. 

“If everything goes right, they’ll forget all about us,” Juli Stormkettle says. 

“I certainly won’t,” Kor’vas says. She rotates the wrist of her gnomish prosthetic a full 360 degrees, its silver paint complimenting the new mercurial Demon Hunter tattoos covering her torso and arms. Juli laughs. “Weaver; the moon where I became a robot.”

Feradon looks up from his console and smiles across the room. Since the silvering of his tattoos, he has preferred more clerical work. It’s the dimming of the Demon voices—there’s less rage, now, and more… sleep. Georgia baps him on the shoulder, and he goes rigid at-attention, continuing to follow her instructions as she takes him through the side-console. The three Demon Hunters affected by the silver blood have found that being in close proximity to one another… well. It is a nice feeling. Lonely Feradon has only just started the process of learning to befriend another soul, and Kor’vas has been patient with him (Friendship with Stygia may be impossible, they both think, as reciprocation is a rare thing to pull from the Captain. But he has accepted fondness from a hefty distance, despite what the rest of the crew may think of the strict leader of Dreamfoil.) Where Stygia has been shut behind her walls, Jace Darkweaver has picked up the slack. He leans against a wall, watching the hopeful Hunter learn.

“Robot,” Kilder the Eti-Manx says. She had been so insistent on joining the crew of Dreamfoil, that Juli revealing the nature of the ship’s Captain hadn’t even turned her away. The Eti-Manx had, indeed, seen Illidan in his true form, and, since they saw him slaughter their Impish mortal enemies in their den, hadn’t immediately attacked. Kilder had started to learn Common. “Ro-bot.”

Juli taps her fingers against her mobility-spider-legs. “Robot. Like this. A machine with either a low level of intelligence, or none at all, often automatic. Usually made of metal, but not necessarily.” Juli lifts herself out of the robot spider legs for a moment, revealing her true legs. Kilder holds up two right hands dramatically. 

“Gross… Stick to three legs or one, like a normal person.”

The crew laugh. Kor’vas’s laugh is a new addition to the ship. Ever since the pain of her Fel transformation has been somewhat muted by the dead King’s silver blood, she has unburied the true nature of her laughter. It is a joy to hear.

Dreamwarden Lurosa walks into the Helm room. He is covered in alien soil, fragrant with earth. He walks into the port side gunroom, still hanging with pleasant drapes and decked out by comfortable synthetic carpets, turns at the door, and smiles at Kor’vas. 

Kor’vas pushes herself off the wall she had been leaning on. “Oops, that’s me. See you on the other side of therapy, everyone.”

“I’ll let you know what Vince and Uunem find out, if they come back,” Georgia says as she passes by. 

“Have a comfy time!” Juli says. 

“Therapy,” Kilder says, climbing like a beetle up the wall. 

“Therapy, it’s—” Juli starts, when Feradon interrupts her.

“It’s the process of figuring out how to be okay in your own body and brain, no matter what that body looks like... no matter what your brain tells you to think.”

“Succinct!” Juli says.

“Oh. That’s sort of like tea,” Kilder says. Georgia coughs hard, erupting into laughter. 

“Juli, tea isn’t a cure to everything,” Georgia says, chuckling nonstop, and her laughter spreads quickly to Jace. 

“Yes! It is! And I stand by this truth! Kilder, don’t listen to her. Tea is therapy.”

Stygia smiles as her crew members laugh and chatter behind her. She takes Dreamfoil over a mountain newly blushing with grass buds and healthy mists. Whatever the future holds, she knows with full certainty that Dreamfoil is ready. 


End file.
